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.

Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.

Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.

There is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.

Our true acquisitions lie only in our charities - we gain only as we give.

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

But for that blindness which is inseparable from malice, what terrible powers of evil would it possess! Fortunately for the world, its venom, like that of the rattlesnake, when most poisonous, clouds the eye of the reptile, and defeats its aim.