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| Certain it is that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as that of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition; but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express. | 1 |
| Cheerfulness is the best promoter of health, and is as friendly to the mind as to the body. | 2 |
| Content thyself to be obscurely good; / When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, / The post of honour is a private station. | 3 |
| Dependence is a perpetual call upon humanity, and a greater incitement to tenderness and pity than any other motive whatsoever. | 4 |
| Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm (fanaticism). | 5 |
| Every passion gives a particular cast to the countenance, and is apt to discover itself in some feature or other. | 6 |
| Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant, accommodates itself to the meanest capacities, silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible. | 7 |
| Good-breeding shows itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears least. | 8 |
| Goodman Fact is allowed by everybody to be a plain-spoken person, and a man of very few words; tropes and figures are his aversion. | 9 |
| Good-nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit, and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more aimiable than beauty. | 10 |
| If any false step be made in the more momentous concerns of life, the whole scheme of ambitious designs is broken. | 11 |
| If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is. | 12 |
| In the unhappy man forget the foe. | 13 |
| Inward cheerfulness is an implicit praise and thanksgiving to Providence under all its dispensations. | 14 |
| It is impossible for any man to form a right judgment of his neighbour’s sufferings. | 15 |
| It is the work of a philosopher to be every day subduing his passions and laying aside his prejudices. | 16 |
| Justice may be furnished out of fire, as far as her sword goes; and courage may be all over a continual blaze. | 17 |
| Knowledge is that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another. | 18 |
| Lampoons and satires, that are written with wit and spirit, are like poisoned darts, which not only inflict a wound, but make it incurable. | 19 |
| Learn never to repine at your own misfortunes, or to envy the happiness of another. | 20 |
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| Love is not to be reason’d down or lost / In high ambition or a thirst of greatness. | 21 |
| Man is the merriest species of the creation. | 22 |
| Man’s conviction should be strong, and so well timed that worldly advantages may seem to have no share in it. | 23 |
| Man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world. | 24 |
| Men of the greatest abilities are most fired with ambition, and, on the contrary, mean and narrow minds are the least actuated by it. | 25 |
| Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity. | 26 |
| Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent. | 27 |
| Much might be said on both sides. | 28 |
| Music is the only sensual gratification which mankind may indulge in to excess without injury to their moral and religious feelings. | 29 |
| Nature has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of man’s own making. | 30 |
| Niggardliness is not good husbandry. | 31 |
| No thought is beautiful which is not just, and no thought can be just which is not founded on truth. | 32 |
| One may often find as much thought on the reverse of a medal as in a canto of Spenser. | 33 |
| Our friends see not our faults, or conceal them, or soften them. | 34 |
| Patience had no sooner placed herself by the mount of sorrows, but the whole heap sunk to such a degree, that it did not appear a third part so big as it was before. | 35 |
| Physic, for the most part, is nothing else but the substitute of exercise and temperance. | 36 |
| Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry and casts resolution itself into despair. | 37 |
| Pride flows from want of reflection and ignorance of ourselves. Knowledge and humility come upon us together. | 38 |
| Quick sensibility is inseparable from a ready understanding. | 39 |
| Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm. | 40 |
| Some virtues are only seen in affliction, and some in prosperity. | 41 |
| Speak that I may see thee. | 42 |
| The even and cheerful temper makes us pleasing to ourselves, to those with whom we converse, and to Him whom we were made to please. | 43 |
| The family is the proper province for private women to shine in. | 44 |
| The jealous man’s disease is of so malignant a nature, that it converts all it takes into its own nourishment. | 45 |
| The man who will live above his present circumstances is in great danger of living in a little time much beneath them, or, as the Italian proverb says, “The man who lives by hope will die by despair.” | 46 |
| The proverb says of the Genoese, that they have a sea without fish, lands without trees, and men without faith. | 47 |
| The schoolboy counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married. | 48 |
| The stars shall fade away, the sun himself / Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; / But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, / Unhurt amidst the war of elements, / The wrecks of matter and the crash of worlds. | 49 |
| The true art of being agreeable is to appear well pleased with all the company, and rather to seem well entertained with them than to bring entertainment to them. | 50 |
| The woman that deliberates is lost. | 51 |
| There is no defence against reproach but obscurity. | 52 |
| There is no real life but cheerful life. | 53 |
| There is not in earth a spectacle more worthy than a great man superior to his sufferings. | 54 |
| Those are often raised into the greatest transports of mirth who are subject to the greatest depressions of melancholy. | 55 |
| ’Tis not in mortals to command success, / But we’ll do more, Sempronius—we’ll deserve it. | 56 |
| ’Tis the divinity that stirs within us; / ’Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, / And intimates eternity to man. | 57 |
| True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable. | 58 |
| Unbounded courage and compassion join’d, / Tempting each other in the victor’s mind, / Alternately proclaim him good and great, / And make the hero and the man complete. | 59 |
| We are always complaining our days are few, and acting as though there would be no end of them. | 60 |
| Wit is a pernicious thing when it is not tempered with virtue and humanity. | 61 |
| Without discretion learning is pedantry and wit impertinence; virtue itself looks like weakness. The best parts only qualify a man to be more sprightly in errors, and active to his own prejudice. | 62 |
| Young men soon give, and soon forget affronts; old age is slow in both. | 63 |
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