The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

Do not expect to be acknowledged for what you are, much less for what you would be; since no one can well measure a great man but upon the bier.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

A mercantile democracy may govern long and widely; a mercantile aristocracy cannot stand.

Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

O Music! how it grieves me that imprudence, intemperance, gluttony, should open their channels into thy sacred stream.