 A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker. |
| The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny. |
| To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian. |
| The law always limits every power it gives. |
| Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge. |
| The chief benefit, which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from its immediate application. |
| Character is the result of a system of stereotyped principals. |
| No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. |
| That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. |
| Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them. |
| Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain. |
| Every wise, just, and mild government, by rendering the condition of its subjects easy and secure, will always abound most in people, as well as in commodities and riches. |
| The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. |
| A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century. |
| It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. |
| Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it. |
| He is happy whom circumstances suit his temper; but he Is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstance. |
| Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous. |
| It's when we start working together that the real healing takes place... it's when we start spilling our sweat, and not our blood. |
| The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst. |
