Every thing in this world, said my father, is big with jest, – and has wit in it, and instruction too, – if we can but find it out.
The world is ashamed of being virtuous.
Keep away from the fire!
There is such a torture, happily unknown to ancient tyranny, as talking a man to death. Marcus Aurelius advises to assent readily to great talkers – in hopes, I suppose, to put an end to the argument.
A man who values a good night’s rest will not lie down with enmity in his heart, if he can help it.
Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints – without working one – one single miracle with them?
The loneliness is the mother of wisdom.
Some people pass through life soberly and religiously enough, without knowing way, or reasoning about it, but, from force of habit merely, go to heaven like fools.
If time, like money, could be laid by while one was not using it, there might be some excuse for the idleness of half of the world, but yet not a full one. For even this would be such an economy as the living on a principal sum, without making it purchase interest.
Writings may be compared to wine. Sense is the strength, but wit the flavor.
Endless is the search of truth.
The more tickets you have in a lottery, the worse your chance. And it is the same of virtues, in the lottery of life.
When, to gratify a private appetite, it is once resolved upon that an ignorant and helpless creature shall be sacrificed, it is an easy matter to pick up sticks enough from any thicket where it has strayed, to make a fire to offer it up with.
I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.
An atheist is more reclaimable than a papist, as ignorance is sooner cured than superstition.
The most affluent may be stripped of all, and find his worldly comforts, like so many withered leaves, dropping from him.
Now or never was the time.
Whatever stress some may lay upon it, a death-bed repentance is but a weak and slender plank to trust our all on.
I had had an affair with the moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame.
I never drink. I cannot do it, on equal terms with others. It costs them only one day; but me three, the first in sinning, the second in suffering, and the third in repenting.