He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius.

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

It should console us for the fact that sin has not totally disappeared from the world, that the saints are not wholly deprived of employment.

Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.

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.

What we call vice in our neighbor may be nothing less than a crude virtue. To him who knows nothing more of precious stones than he can learn from a daily contemplation of his breastpin, a diamond in the mine must be a very uncompromising sort of stone.

Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.