The true motives of our actions, like the real pipes of an organ, are usually concealed; but the gilded and hollow pretext is pompously placed in the front for show.

As the grand discordant harmony of the celestial bodies may be explained by the simple principles of gravity and impulse, so also in that more wonderful and complicated microcosm, the heart of man, all the phenomena of morals are perhaps resolvable into one single principle, the pursuit of apparent good; for although customs universally vary, yet man in all climates and countries is essentially the same.

A thorough-paced knave will rarely quarrel with one whom he can cheat: his revenge is plunder; therefore he is usually the most forgiving of beings, upon the principle that if he come to an open rupture, he must defend himself; and this does not suit a man whose vocation it is to keep his hands in the pocket of another.

In most quarrels there is a fault on both sides. A quarrel may be compared to a spark, which cannot be produced without a flint, as well as steel. Either of them may hammer on wood forever; no fire will follow.

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer.

For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.