Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.

Life is the art of being well deceived.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

Almost every sect of Christianity is a perversion of its essence, to accommodate it to the prejudices of the world.

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.

Within my heart is lurking suspicion, and base fear, and shame and hate; but above all, tyrannous love sits throned, crowned with her graces, silent and in tears.