Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good.

Those who speak against the great do not usually speak from morality, but from envy.

Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.

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

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.

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

We oftener say things because we can say them well, than because they are sound and reasonable.