The more gross the fraud the more glibly will it go down, and the more greedily be swallowed, since folly will always find faith where impostors will find imprudence.

If all seconds were as averse to duels as their principals, very little blood would be shed in that way.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them.

You cannot separate charity and religion.

Too high an appreciation of our own talents is the chief cause why experience preaches to us all in vain.

The enthusiast has been compared to a man walking in a fog; everything immediately around him, or in contact with him, appears sufficiently clear and luminous; but beyond the little circle of which he himself is the centre, all is mist and error and confusion.

The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss.