Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts.
Every desire bears its death in its very gratification. Curiosity languishes under repeated stimulants, and novelties cease to excite and surprise, until at length we cannot wonder even at a miracle.
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortunes.
With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief.
History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.
The oil and wine of merry meeting.
Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture.
Poetry is evidently a contagious complaint.
It lightens the stroke to draw near to Him who handles the rod.
I have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme, and a mind awake.
Those who are well assured of their own standing are least apt to trepass on that of others.
A mother is the truest friend we have...
The paternal hearth, the rallying-place of the affections.
Speculation is the romance of trade, and casts contempt upon on all its sober realities. It renders the stock-jobber a magician, and the exchange a region of enchantment.
Men are always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the other as by their own imagination. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying mere mortals.
The natural principle of war is to do the most harm to our enemy with the least harm to ourselves; and this of course is to be effected by stratagem.
Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.
No man is so methodical as a complete idler, and none so scrupulous in measuring out his time as he whose time is worth nothing.
There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.
A woman’s life is a history of the affections.