To marry a second time represents the triumph of hope over experience.

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

Let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.

Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.

Pain and disease awaken us to convictions which are necessary to our moral condition.

Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.

Always set a high value on spontaneous kindness. He whose inclination prompts him to cultivate your friendship of his own accord, will love you more than one whom you have been at pains to attach to you.

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.

No estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculations than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.

As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.