Our imagination so magnifies this present existence, by the power of continual reflection on it, and so attenuates eternity, by not thinking of it at all, that we reduce an eternity to nothingness, and expand a mere nothing to an eternity; and this habit is so inveterately rooted in us that all the force of reason cannot induce us to lay it aside.

Justice and truth are two such subtle points, that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

The heart has arguments with which the logic of mind is not aquainted.

Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.

If you want to be a real seeker of truth, you need to, at least once in your lifetime, doubt in, as much as it's possible, in everything.

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

It is superstitious to put one's hopes in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them.