Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.

The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.

The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.