Great pleasures are much less frequent than great pains.

The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.

There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.

While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone.

Moving from an objective statement of fact to a subjective statement of value does not work, because it leaves open questions that have not been answered.

There is, indeed a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are corrected by common sense and reflection.

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