“One of the most important but one of the most difficult things for a powerful mind is to be its own master.”

It is not the business of virtue to extirpate the affections of the mind, but to regulate them.

Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.

Look what a little vain dust we are!

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.

Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

When all thy mercies, O my God, My rising soul surveys, Transported with the view I’m lost, in wonder, love and praise.

Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man’s own making.

When I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves,

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

She is one of God’s women fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

Nature in one of her beneficent moods has ordained that even death has some antidote to its own terrors.

Despair has its own calms.

Owing to the fact he was a mute they were able to give him all the qualities they wanted him to have.

Courage is required not only in a person’s occasional crucial decision for his own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place the bricks in the structure of his building of himself into a person who acts with freedom and responsibility.

One central need in life is to fulfill its own potential.

As partisans of our own way of life, we cannot help thinking in a partisan manner.