Pain wastes the Body, Pleasures the Understanding.

In going on with these Experiments, how many pretty systems do we build, which we soon find ourselves oblig'd to destroy! If there is no other Use discover'd of Electricity, this, however, is something considerable, that it may help to make a vain Man humble.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Each year one vicious habit discarded, in time might make the worst of us good.

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.

Private property...is the creature of society and is subject to the calls of that society even to the last farthing.