This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society.
The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.
That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.
Be a philosopher but, amid all your philosophy be still a man.
To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.
Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.
Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.
