A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.

And indeed nothing but the most determined scepticism, along with a great degree of indolence, can justify this aversion to metaphysics. For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, it is certain it must lie very deep and abstruse: and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous. I pretend to no such advantage in the philosophy I am going to unfold, and would esteem it a strong presumption against it, were it so very easy and obvious.

Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider'd as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc'd union.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny.

To be a philosophical sceptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential to being a sound, believing Christian.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

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