We should not so much esteem our poverty as a misfortune, were it not that the world treats it so much as a crime

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

It is with charity as with money--the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

Nature has provided for the exigency of privation, by putting the measure of our necessities far below the measure of our wants. Our necessities are to our wants as Falstaff's pennyworth of bread to his any quantity of sack.

Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate more than they do.

Can that which is the greatest virtue in philosophy, doubt (called by Galileo the father of invention), be in religion what the priests term it, the greatest of sins?

The beauty seen is partly in him who sees it. [a predisposition to notice the beautiful, in everything.]