If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance. In travelling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne. Knowledge is more than equivalent to force. When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality. Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance. Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures. Money and time are the heaviest burdens in life: and among mortals, those who are most unhappy are the ones who have more than they need. Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages. Prudence keeps life safe, but it does not often make it happy. | 
