A ray of imagination or of wisdom may enlighten the universe, and glow into remotest centuries.
Make a point never go clear, it is great odds that a man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination.
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
Our youth we can have but to-day, We may always find time to grow old.
The question between the materialists and me is not, whether things have a real existence out of the mind of this or that person, but whether they have an absolute existence, distinct from being perceived by God, and exterior to all minds.
Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.
Certainly he who can digest a second or third fluxion need not, methinks, be squeamish about any point in divinity.
Westward the course of empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
If we admit a thing so extraordinary as the creation of this world, it should seem that we admit something strange, and odd, and new to human apprehension, beyond any other miracle whatsoever.
God is a being of transcendent and unlimited perfections: his nature therefore is incomprehensible to finite spirits.
How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas?
To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.
I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.
I am apt to think, if we knew what it was to be an angel for one hour, we should return to this world, though it were to sit on the brightest throne in it, with vastly more loathing and reluctance than we would now descend into a loathsome dungeon or sepulchre.
The method of Fluxions is the general key by help whereof the modern mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature.
For my own private satisfaction, I had rather be master of my own time than wear a diadem.
The fawning courtier and the surly squire often mean the same thing, – each his own interest.
In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now.
What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!
Every knave is a thorough knave, and a thorough knave is a knave throughout.