Men are never so good or so bad as their opinions.
A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.
Whatever is popular deserves attention.
Diffused knowledge immortalizes itself.
Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.
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.