To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

When ideas float in our mind, without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call reverie.

Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature

What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.

It is one thing to persuade, another to command; one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties.

Certainly great persons had need to borrow other men's opinions to think themselves happy; for if they judge by their own feeling, they cannot find it: but if they think with themselves what other men think of them, and that other men would fain be as they are, then they are happy as it were by report, when, perhaps, they find the contrary within.