Worry is the only insupportable misfortune of life..

What Anacharsis said of the vine may aptly enough be said of prosperity. She bears the three grapes of drunkenness, pleasure, and sorrow; and happy i….

Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract rea….

The fire of my adversity has purged the mass of my acquaintance..

There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that it is hardly worth while to be her….

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue..

It is the modest, not the presumptuous, inquirer who makes a real and safe progress in the discovery of divine truths. One follows Nature and Nature'….

Whatever study tends neither directly nor indirectly to make us better men and citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; and….

It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or ….

No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reas….

I have observed that in comedies the best actor plays the droll, while some scrub rogue is made the fine gentleman or hero. Thus it is in the farce o….

The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age bec….

Our liberty cannot be taken away unless the people are themselves accomplices..

Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties..

I think it indisputable that the distance between the intellectual faculties of different men is greater than that between the same faculties in some….

God himself, with reverence be it spoken, is not an absolute but a limited monarch, limited by the rule which infinite wisdom prescribes to infinite ….

As well as might we say that a ship is built, loaded and manned for the sake of any particular pilot, instead of acknowledging that the pilot is made….

Indifference must be a crime in us, to be ranked but one degree below treachery; for deserting the commonwealth is next to betraying it..

A long novitiate of acquaintance should precede the vows of friendship..

History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning..

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their….