Maxims are the condensed good sense of nations.
The frivolous work of polished idleness.
Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions.
Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.
A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.
Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility.