By anticipation we sugar misery and enjoy happiness before they are in being. We can set the sun and stars forward, or lose sight of them by wandering into those retired parts of eternity when the heavens and earth shall be no more.
We are apt to rely upon future prospects, and become really expensive while we are only rich in possibility. We live up to our expectations, not to our possessions, and make a figure proportionable to what we may be, not what we are.
Most of our fellow-subjects are guided either by the prejudice of education or by a deference to the judgment of those who perhaps in their own hearts disapprove the opinions which they industriously spread among the multitude.
The pride of woman, natural to her, never sleeps until modesty is gone.
Wine displays every little spot of the soul in its utmost deformity.
The great number of the Jews furnishes us with a sufficient cloud of witnesses that attest the truth of the Bible.
The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.
Man is the merriest species of the creation; all above or below him are serious.
Virtue which shuns, the day.
There is nothing which strengthens faith more than the observance of morality.
Even the greatest actions of a celebrated person labor under this disadvantage, that however surprising and extraordinary they may be, they are no more than what are expected from him.
Learning, like traveling and all other methods of improvement, as it finishes good sense, so it makes a silly man ten thousand times more insufferable by supplying variety of matter to his impertinence, and giving him an opportunity of abounding in absurdities.
Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion – a form of knowledge without the power of it.
Every passion gives a particular cast to the countenance, and is apt to discover itself in some feature or other. I have seen an eye curse for half an hour together, and an eyebrow call a man a scoundrel.
Poverty palls the most generous spirits; it cows industry, and casts resolution itself into despair.
In England we see people lulled sleep with solid and elaborate discourses of piety, who would be warmed and transported out of themselves by the bellowings and distortions of enthusiasm.
The very first discovery of beauty strikes the mind with an inward joy, and spreads a cheerfulness and delight through all its faculties.
No man writes a book without meaning something, though he may not have the faculty of writing consequentially and expressing his meaning.
It is folly to seek the approbation of any being besides the Supreme.
The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them.