Is it worth the name of freedom to be at liberty to play the fool?

He would be laughed at, that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger, at past fifty. And he will not have much better success, who shall endeavour, at that age, to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory.

The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

To be rational is so glorious a thing, that two-legged creatures generally content themselves with the title.

Any one reflecting upon the thought he has of the delight, which any present or absent thing is apt to produce in him, has the idea we call love.

In the beginning, all the world was America.