Few enjoyments are given from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence, the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society.

If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.

Human happiness seems to consist in three ingredients: action, pleasure and indolence.

One would appear ridiculous who would say, that it is only probable the sun will rise to-morrow, or that all men must die; thoughit is plain we have no further assurance of these facts than what experience affords us.

It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.

It is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint and airs and apparel which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.

And though the philosopher may live remote from business, the genius of philosophy, if carefully cultivated by several, must gradually diffuse itself throughout the whole society, and bestow a similar correctness on every art and calling.