There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.

What leads to unhappiness is making pleasure the chief aim.

Learning, like money, may be of so base a coin as to be utterly void of use.

When misfortunes happen to such as dissent from us in matters of religion, we call them judgments; when to those of our own sect, we call them trials; when to persons neither way distinguished, we are content to attribute them to the settled course of things.

I have been formerly so silly as to hope that every servant I had might be made a friend; I am now convinced that the nature of servitude generally bears a contrary tendency. People's characters are to be chiefly collected from their education and place in life; birth itself does but little.

Fools are very often united in the strictest intimacies, as the lighter kinds of woods are the most closely glued together.

Glory relaxes often and debilitates the mind; censure stimulates and contracts,--both to an extreme. Simple fame is, perhaps, the proper medium.