The world is an excellent judge in general, but a very bad one in particular.

Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.

True delicacy, as true generosity, is more wounded by an offence from itself--if I may be allowed the expression--than to itself.

Surely no man can reflect, without wonder upon the vicissitudes of human life arising from causes in the highest degree accidental and trifling. If you trace the necessary concatenation of human events a very little way back, you may perhaps discover that a person's very going in or out of a door has been the means of coloring with misery or happiness the remaining current of his life.

What an argument in favor of social connections is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasure we have more.

Avarice starves its possessor to fatten those who come after, and who are eagerly awaiting the demise of the accumulator.

Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.