It were better, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that divinity, the better.

Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every pagewe soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.

When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds.

Self-denial is a monkish virtue.

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.