When a woman hath ceased to be quite the same to us, it matters little how different she becomes.

No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.

We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

The sweetest souls, like the sweetest flowers, soon canker in cities, and no purity is rarer there than the purity of delight.

Democracy is always the work of kings. Ashes, which in themselves are sterile, fertilize the land they are cast upon.

Clear writers, like fountains, do not seem so deep as they are; the turbid look the most profound.

As the pearl ripens in the obscurity of its shell, so ripens in the tomb all the fame that is truly precious.