Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.
All of heaven we have below.
They were a people so primitive they did not know how to get money, except by working for it.
Nothing that isn’t a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.
Music raises in the mind of the hearer great conceptions: it strengthens and advances praise into rapture.
The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.
Everything that is new or uncommon raises a pleasure in the imagination, because it fills the soul with an agreeable surprise, gratifies its curiosity, and gives it an idea of which it was not before possessed.
Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.
There is not a more pleasing exercise of the mind than gratitude. It is accompanied with such an inward satisfaction that the duty is sufficiently rewarded by the performance.
Thus I live in the world rather as a Spectator of mankind, than as one of the species, by which means I have made myself a speculative statesman, soldier, merchant, and artisan, without ever meddling with any practical part of life.
Good-breeding shows itself most where to an ordinary eye it appears the least.
Peaceable times are the best to live in, though not so proper to furnish materials for a writer.
Complaisance renders a superior amiable, an equal agreeable, and an inferior acceptable.
I consider time as an in immense ocean, in which many noble authors are entirely swallowed up.
Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.
There are no more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants. They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of Nature, find work for the poor, and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.
Troops of heroes undistinguished die.
What can be nobler than the idea it gives us of the Supreme Being?
It happened very providentially, to the honor of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were at their height.
A well regulated commerce is not, like law, physic, or divinity, to be overstocked with hands; but, on the contrary, flourishes by multitudes, and gives employment to all its professors.