We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave.

Don't think to hunt two hares with one dog.

Is there anything men take more pains about than to render themselves unhappy?

Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs.

I say it is impossible that so sensible a people [citizens of Paris], under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.

A lonely man on a rainy night who cannot read.