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.

Age is suspicious but is not itself often suspected.

When ill news comes too late to be serviceable to your neighbor, keep it to yourself.

Troops of furies march in the drunkard’s triumph.

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.

Laugh as loud as you please at your companion’s wit; do not even smile at his folly.

Silence is a trick when it imposes. Pedants and scholars, churchmen and physicians, abound in silent pride.

Unless the habit leads to happiness the best habit is to contract none.

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.

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.