Almost all Christians being wretchedly enslaved to blindness and ignorance, which the priests are so far from preventing or removing, that they blacken the darkness, and promote the delusion: wisely foreseeing that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more.

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

Read first the best books. The important thing for you is not how much you know, but the quality of what you know.

Great abundance of riches cannot be gathered and kept by any man without sin.

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive.

It seems to me to be the best proof of an evangelical disposition, that persons are not angry when reproached, and have a Christian charity for those that ill deserve it.

By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance.