Abstinence is easier than temperance.
I am like a book, with pages that have stuck together for want of use: my mind needs unpacking and the truths stored within must be turned over from time to time, to be ready when occasion demands.
It is impossible to imagine anything which better becomes a ruler than mercy.
Drunkenness does not create vice; it merely brings it into view.
That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.
I will have a care of being a slave to myself, for it is a perpetual, a shameful, and the heaviest of all servitudes; and this may be done by moderate desires.