Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow.

It is more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work

..when, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.

Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the objects acquire an union in the imagination.

The great charm of poetry consists in lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or thoseof the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions.