Mystery magnifies danger, as a fog the sun, the hand that warned Belshazzar derived its horrifying effect from the want of a body.

Shakespeare, Butler and Bacon have rendered it extremely difficult for all who come after them to be sublime, witty or profound.

Of present fame think little, and of future less; the praises that we receive after we are buried, like the flowers that are strewed over our grave, may be gratifying to the living, but they are nothing to the dead.

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.

He that studies only men will get the body of knowledge without the soul; and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.