There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them

We are so constituted that we can gain intense pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.