Anger is uneasiness or discomposure of the mind upon the receipt of any injury, with a present purpose of revenge.
I am sure, zeal or love for truth can never permit falsehood to be used in the defense of it.
Firmness or stiffness of the mind is not from adherence to truth, but submission to prejudice.
Thus parents, by humouring and cockering them when little, corrupt the principles of nature in their children, and wonder afterwards to taste the bitter waters, when they themselves have poison’d the fountain.
The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, into which a young gentleman should be enter’d by degrees, as he can bear it; and the earlier the better, so he be in safe and skillful hands to guide him.
Children should from the beginning be bred up in an abhorrence of killing or tormenting any living creature; and be taught not to spoil or destroy any thing, unless it be for the preservation or advantage of some other that is nobler.
We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us; nor is it to be wonder’d at in children, who better understand what they see than what they hear.
The difference, so observable in men’s understandings and parts, does not arise so much from their natural faculties, as acquired habits.
False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.
Who hath a prospect of the different state of perfect happiness or misery that attends all men after this life, depending on their behavior, the measures of good and evil that govern his choice are mightily changed.
Laws provide, as much as ispossible that the goods and health of subjects be not injured by the fraud and violence of others. They do not guard them from thenegligence or ill-husbandry of the possessors themselves.
I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.
The Church which taught men not to keep faith with heretics, had no claim to toleration.
Faith is the assent to any proposition not made out by the deduction of reason but upon the credit of the proposer.
With books we stand on the shoulders of giants.
When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success...
These two, I say, viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings.
Many a good poetic vein is buried under a trade, and never produces any thing for want of improvement.
Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.
In the discharge of thy place set before thee the best examples; for imitation is a globe of precepts.