No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

Bad taste is a species of bad morals.

The trouble with men of sense is that they are so dreadfully in earnest all the while.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

Our first and last love is self-love.

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?