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The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Futurity is the proper abode of hope and fear, with all their train and progeny of subordinate apprehensions and desires.

Even grief, that passion to which the virtuous and tender mind is particularly subject, will be obviated or alleviated by the same thoughts.

The disturbers of our happiness, in this world, are our desires, our griefs, and our fears; and to all these, the consideration of mortality is a certain and adequate remedy.

Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings, because they are his own.

A long life may be passed without finding a friend in whose understanding and virtue we can equally confide, and whose opinion we can value at once for its justness and sincerity.

By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.

Evil is uncertain in the same degree as good, and for the reason that we ought not to hope too securely, we ought not to fear with too much dejection.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul, and the faculties are chained to a single object, which can never be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.

The time of such a man is always spent in forming schemes, which a change of wind hinders him from executing, his powers fume away in projects and in hope, and the day of action never arrives.

Native deformity cannot be rectified, a dead friend cannot return, and the hours of youth trifled away in folly, or lost in sickness, cannot be restored.

Parents we can have but once; and he promises himself too much, who enters life with the expectation of finding many friends.

The longer we live, and the more we think, the higher value we learn to put on the friendship and tenderness of parents and of friends.

Many friendships are formed by a community of sensual pleasures: all these will be cut off.

To disappoint a friend is unpleasing; and he that forms expectations like yours, must be disappointed.

Think only when you see me, that you see a man who loves you, and is proud and glad that you love him.