Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.

We should choose our books as we would our companions, for their sterling and intrinsic merit.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

With the offspring of genius, the law of parturition is reversed; the throes are in the conception, the pleasure in the birth.

Theories are private property, but truth is common stock.

It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave, than to expend it, like a gentleman.

No man can promise himself even fifty years of life, but any man may, if he please, live in the proportion of fifty years in forty-let him rise early, that he may have the day before him, and let him make the most of the day, by determining to expend it on two sorts of acquaintance only-those by whom something may be got, and those from whom something maybe learned.