Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

• The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
• The true, strong, and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small.
• Being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
• We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over so in a series of kindness there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
• Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.
• We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
• Men are wise in proportion not to their experience but to their capacity for experience.
• The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.
• There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
• If you are idle, be not solitary if you are solitary be not idle.