Security will produce danger.
That observation which is called knowledge of the world will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.
It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.
No two men can be half an hour together but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.
Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.
It is not from reason and prudence that people marry, but from inclination.
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found; and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.
Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.
To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
Humanity has unquestionably one really effective weapon
Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.
In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment and will never be more divine in the lapse of the ages. Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.
He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.
The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.
I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.
