“He that has never known adversity is but half acquainted with others, or with himself.”

He that has energy enough to root out a vice should go further, and try to plant a virtue in its place.

Our minds are as different as our faces. We are all traveling to one destination: happiness, but few are going by the same road.

Discretion has been termed the better part of valour, and it is more certain, that diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.

To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet.

Great men, like comets, are eccentric in their courses, and formed to do extensive good by modes unintelligible to vulgar minds.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.

Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.

True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.

Men are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.

Women do not transgress the bounds of decorum so often as men; but when they do, they go greater lengths.

He that places himself neither higher nor lower than he ought to do exercises the truest humility.

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another.

In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.

Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.

It is better to will the good than to know the truth.

I know and love the good, yet, ah! the worst pursue.

Moreover, it thus follows that not a great deal of time was needed for the large animals of the three major parts of the world to become known to the people who spent time on the coasts of those regions.

I know not how to express better, what my sins appear to me to be, than by heaping infinite upon infinite, and multiplying infinite by infinite. When I look into my heart and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.

He who does not know Him, knows nothing else as it truly is.

What name to call thee by, O virgin fair, I know not, for thy looks are not of earth And more than mortal seems thy countenances.

I know I could be an astronomer of this swooning.