C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Heirs
What madness is it for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.
He who sees his heir in his own child, carries his eye over hopes and possessions lying far beyond his gravestone, viewing his life, even here, as a period but closed with a comma. He who sees his heir in another man’s child sees the full stop at the end of the sentence.
An heiress, remaining unmarried, is a prey to all manner of extortion and imposition, and with the best intentions, becomes—through a bounty—a corruption to her neighborhood and a curse to the poor; or, if experience shall put her on her guard, she will lead a life of suspicion and resistance, to the injury of her own mind and nature.