All Severity That Does Not

Plenty Is The Original Cause Of Many Of Our Needs; And Even The Poverty, Which Is So Frequent And Distressful In Civilized Nations, Proceeds Often From That Change Of Manners Which Opulence Has Produced. Nature Makes Us Poor Only When We Want Necessaries; But Custom Gives The Name Of Poverty To The Want Of Superfluities.

Yet Reason Frowns In War's Unequal Game, Where Wasted Nations Raise A Single Name; And Mortgag'd States Their Grandsire's Wreaths Regret, From Age To Age In Everlasting Debt; Wreaths Which At Last The Dear-bought Right Convey To Rust On Medals, Or On Stones Decay.

The Morality Of An Action Depends On The Motive From Which We Act. If I Fling Half A Crown To A Beggar With Intention To Break His Head And He Picks It Up And Buy Victuals With It, The Physical Effect Is Good. But With Respect To Me The Action Is Very Wrong.

It Would Add Much To Human Happiness, If An Art Could Be Taught Of Forgetting All Of Which The Remembrance Is At Once Useless And Afflictive, That The Mind Might Perform Its Functions Without Encumbrance, And The Past Might No Longer Encroach Upon The Present.

By Taking A Second Wife He Pays The Highest Compliment To The First, By Showing That She Made Him So Happy As A Married Man, That He Wishes To Be So A Second Time.