No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.

Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.

The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth.... It is thus that the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air.

We must calculate not on the weather, nor on fortune, but upon God and ourselves. He may fail us in the gratification of our wishes, but never in the encounter with our exigencies.

Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes.

The dread of criticism is the death of genius.

The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.