Idlers cannot even find time to be idle, or the industrious to be at leisure. We must always be doing or suffering
Egotism is more like an offense, than a crime; though it is allowable to speak of yourself, provided nothing is advanced in favor; but I cannot help suspecting that those who abuse themselves are, in reality, angling for approbation.
Troops of furies march in the drunkard's triumph.
Many have been ruined by their fortunes, and many have escaped ruin by the want of fortune. To obtain it the great have become little, and the little great.
When we meet with better fare than was expected, the disappointment is overlooked even by the unscrupulous. When we meet with worse than was expected, philosophers alone know how to make it better.
Though fancy may be the patient's complaint, necessity is often the doctor's.
An everlasting tranquility is, in my imagination, the highest possible felicity, because I know of no felicity on earth higher than that which a peaceful mind and contented heart afford.
Novels do not force their fair readers to sin, they only instruct them how to sin; the consequences of which are fully detailed, and not in a way calculated to seduce any but weak but weak minds; few of their heroines are happily disposed of.
The purse of the patient often protracts his case.
It would be a considerable consolation to the poor and discontented could they but see the means whereby the wealth they covet has been acquired, or the misery that it entails.
The sluggard is a living insensible.
When ill news comes too late to be serviceable to your neighbor, keep it to yourself.
When soured by disappointment we must endeavor to pursue some fixed and pleasing course of study, that there may be no blank leaf in our book of life. Painful and disagreeable ideas vanish from the mind that can fix its attention upon any subject.
Many good qualities are not sufficient to balance a single want - the want of money.
Never suffer the prejudice of the eye to determine the heart.
Suicides pay the world a bad compliment. Indeed, it may so happen that the world has been beforehand with them in incivility. Granted. Even then the retaliation is at their own expense.
Those beings only are fit for solitude who are like nobody, and are liked by nobody.
Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.
Gambling houses are temples where the most sordid and turbulent passions contend; there no spectator can be indifferent. A card or a small square of ivory interests more than the loss of an empire, or the ruin of an unoffending group of infants, and their nearest relatives.
A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.
