Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed and rightly.

Abstinence is easier than temperance.

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

Human affairs are like a chess-game: only those who do not take it seriously can be called good players. Life is like an earthen pot: only when it is shattered, does it manifest its emptiness.

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult