Logic is a large drawer, containing some useful instruments, and many more that are superfluous. A wise man will look into it for two purposes, to avail himself of those instruments that are really useful, and to admire the ingenuity with which those that are not so, are assorted and arranged.

Unlike the sun, intellectual luminaries shine brightest after they set.

Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.

God is on the side of virtue; for whoever dreads punishment suffers it, and whoever deserves it, dreads it .

To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.

Pedantry crams our heads with learned lumber and takes out our brains to make room for it.

Idleness is the grand Pacific Ocean of life, and in that stagnant abyss the most salutary things produce no good, the most noxious no evil. Vice, indeed, abstractedly considered, may be, and often is engendered in idleness; but the moment it becomes efficiently vice, it must quit its cradle and cease to be idle.