Absence and death are the same -- only that in death there is no suffering.
O what a thing is age! Death without death's quiet.
The flame of anger, bright and brief, sharpens the barb of love.
Heat and animosity, contest and conflict, may sharpen the wits, although they rarely do; they never strengthen the understanding, clear the perspicacity, guide the judgment, or improve the heart.
What is reading, but silent conversation.
No thoroughly occupied person was ever found really miserable.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Consult duty not events.
Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature. Never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.
People, like nails, lose their effectiveness when they lose direction and begin to bend.
Great men always pay deference to greater.
We cannot be contented because we are happy, and we cannot be happy because we are contented.
We are no longer happy as soon as we wish to be happier.
There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.
We think that we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.
A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.
An ingenuous mind feels in unmerited praise the bitterest reproof.
We talk on principal, but act on motivation.
Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.
In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.
I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.
A solitude is the audience-chamber of God.
My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.
The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
Wrong is but falsehood put in practice.