Reason in a creature is a faculty of widening the rules and purposes of the use of all its powers far beyond natural instinct; it acknowledges no limits to its projects. Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another.

An organized product of nature is that in which all the parts are mutually ends and means.

If I am to constrain you by any law, it must be one by which I am also bound.

The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God; we can only believe in Him.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

But only he who, himself enlightened, is not afraid of shadows.