There are only two things in which the false professors of all religions have agreed--to persecute all other sects and to plunder their own.

Fortune, like other females, prefers a lover to a master, and submits with impatience to control; but he that wooes her with opportunity and importunity will seldom court her in vain.

He that dies a martyr proves that he was not a knave, but by no means that he was not a fool.

Gold is worshipped in all climates, without a single temple, and by all classes, without a single hypocrite.

It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves.

Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travelers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.

Calumny crosses oceans, scales mountains and traverses deserts, with greater ease than the Scythian Abaris, and like him, rides upon a poisoned arrow.