Kitsch is: a species of beauty, which, as it is florid and superficial, pleases at first; but soon palls upon the taste, and is rejected with disdain, at least rated at much lower value.

.. that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.

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.

God is an ever-present spirit guiding all that happens to a wise and holy end.

It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behavior, by my experience of past events.

It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.

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