You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.
No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Language is the dress of thought.
There are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits that are not good until they are rotten.
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.
At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.
To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.
Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.
To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.
Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.
All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.
It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.
What is easy is seldom excellent.
I have found men to be more kind than I expected, and less just.
Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.