Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.

The chaste severity of the fathers in whatever related to the commerce of the two sexes flowed from the same principle -- their abhorrence of every enjoyment which might gratify the sensual and degrade the spiritual nature of man. It was their favourite opinion, that if Adam had preserved his obedience to the Creator, he would have lived for ever in a state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled paradise with a race of innocent and immortal beings.

The difference of language, dress, and manners . . . severs and alienates the nations of the globe.

A small number of temples was protected by the fears, the venality, the taste, or the prudence of the civil and ecclesiastical governors. The temple of the Celestial Venus at Carthage, whose sacred precincts formed a circumference of two miles, was judiciously converted into a Christian church; and a similar consecration has preserved inviolate the majestic dome of the Pantheon at Rome.

Under a democratical government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.

The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.