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.

Pleasure is to a woman what the sun is to the flower: if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates, and destroys. But the duties of domestic life, exercised as they must be in retirement, and calling forth all the sensibilities of the female, are perhaps as necessary to the full development of her charms, as the shade and the shower are to the rose, confirming its beauty, and increasing its fragrance.

That writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel. Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by what he adds, but by what he takes away.

The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.

A high degree of intellectual refinement in the female is the surest pledge society can have for the improvement of the male.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error.

Our incomes should be like our shoes, if too small, they will gall and pinch us, but if too large, they will cause us to stumble and to trip. Wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much but wants more. True contentment depends not upon what we have; a tub was large enough for Diogenes, but a world was too little for Alexander.

There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed; to persecute all other sects, and to plunder their own.

Pain may be said to follow pleasure as its shadow; but the misfortune is that in this particular case, the substance belongs to the shadow, the emptiness to its cause.

We ask advice, but we mean approbation.

The wise man has his follies, no less than the fool; but it has been said that herein lies the difference--the follies of the fool are known to the world, but hidden from himself; the follies of the wise are known to himself, but hidden from the world.

It has been said that men carry on a kind of coasting trade with religion. In the voyage of life, they profess to be in search of heaven, but take care not to venture so far in their approximations to it, as entirely to lose sight of the earth; and should their frail vessel be in danger of shipwreck, they will gladly throw their darling vices overboard, as other mariners their treasures, only to fish them up again when the storm is over.

Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand.

By privileges, immunities, or prerogatives to give unlimited swing to the passions of individuals, and then to hope that they will restrain them, is about as reasonable as to expect that the tiger will spare the hart to browse upon the herbage.

The philosopher is neither a chemist, a smith, a merchant, or a manufacturer; but he both teaches and is taught by all of them; and his prayer is that the intellectual light may be as general as the solar, and uncontrolled.

The highest knowledge can be nothing more than the shortest and clearest road to truth; all the rest is pretension, not performance, mere verbiage and grandiloquence, from which we can learn nothing.

There is more jealousy between rival wits, than rival beauties, for vanity has no sex.

A man who knows the world will not only make the most of everything he does know, but of many things he does not know, and will gain more credit by his adroit mode of hiding his ignorance than the pedant by his awkward attempt to exhibit his erudition.

There is a paradox in pride--it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Knowledge is twofold and consists not only in an affirmation of what is true, but in the negation of what is false.

How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy. In youth, we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age, we are looking backwards to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.

Those who whorship Gold in a world so corrupt as this we live in, have at least one thing to plead in defence of their idolatry--the power of their Idol. It is true, that like other Idols, it can neither move, see, hear, feel, or understand; but, unlike other Idols, it has often communicated all these powers to those who had them not, and annihilated them in those who had. This Idol can boast of two peculiarities; it is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue, which he alone that can practice in himself, can willingly believe in another.

In all governments, there must of necessity be both the law and the sword; laws without arms would give us not liberty, but licentiousness; and arms without laws would produce not subjection, but slavery. The law, therefore, should be unto the sword, what the handle is to the hatchet; it should direct the stroke and temper the force.

If kings would only determine not to extend their dominions until they had filled them with happiness, they would find the smallest territories too large, but the longest life too short for the full accomplishment of so grand and so noble an ambition.

The further we advance in knowledge, the more simplicity shall we discover in those primary rules that regulate all the apparently endless, complicated, and multiform operations of the Godhead.

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