Some frauds succeed from the apparent candor, the open confidence, and the full blaze of ingenuousness that is thrown around them. The slightest mystery would excite suspicion and ruin all. Such stratagems may be compared to the stars; they are discoverable by darkness and hidden only by light.

You cannot separate charity and religion.

Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.

There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.

That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

I question if Epicurus and Hume have done mankind a greater service by the looseness of their doctrines than by the purity of their lives. Of such men we may more justly exclaim, than of Caesar, "Confound their virtues, they've undone the world!