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

As there are some flowers which you should smell but slightly to extract all that is pleasant in them ... so there are some men with whom a slight acquaintance is quite sufficient to draw out all that is agreeable; a more intimate one would be unsafe and unsatisfactory.

Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

Study is the bane of childhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of adulthood, and a restorative in old age.

O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.

Cruelty in all countries is the companion of anger; but there is only one, and never was another on the globe, where she coquets both with anger and mirth.

The assailant is often in the right; that the assailed is always.