“Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me.”
“Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.”
“Oh to have a lodge in some vast wilderness. Where rumors of oppression and deceit, of unsuccessful and successful wars may never reach me anymore.”
“Ceremony leads her bigots forth, prepared to fight for shadows of no worth. While truths, on which eternal things depend, can hardly find a single friend.”
“A fretful temper will divide the closest knot that may be tied, by ceaseless sharp corrosion; a temper passionate and fierce may suddenly your joys disperse at one immense explosion.”
“Candid and generous and just. Boys care but little whom they trust. An error soon corrected -- for who but learns in riper years. That man, when smoothest he appears, is most to be suspected?”
“A man renowned for repartee will seldom scruple to make free with friendship's finest feeling, will thrust a dagger at your breast, and say he wounded you in jest, by way of balm for healing.”
“The man that hails you Tom or Jack, And proves, by thumping on your back, His sense of your great merit, Is such a friend that one had need Be very much his friend indeed To pardon or to bear it.”
“Knowledge, a rude unprofitable mass, the mere materials with which wisdom builds, till smoothed and squared and fitted to its place, does but encumber whom it seems to enrich. Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”
“Forced from home and all its pleasures Afric's coast I left forlorn, To increase a stranger's treasures O'er the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, Paid my price in paltry gold; But, though slave they have enrolled me, Minds are never to be sold.”