The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution; who resists to sorest temptation from within and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; who is calmest in storms, and most fearless under menaces and frowns; whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God is most unfaltering.

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.

It is equally a fault to believe all men or to believe none.

Pleasure dies at the very moment when it charms us most.

We are so vain as to set the highest value upon those things to which nature has assigned the lowest place. What can be more coarse and rude in the mind than the precious metals, or more slavish and dirty than the people that dig and work them? And yet they defile our minds more than our bodies, and make the possessor fouler than the artificer of them. Rich men, in fine, are only the greater slaves.

Many men would have arrived at wisdom had they not believed themselves to have arrived there already.

...nothing is so entirely admirable as a man bravely wretched.