There seems to be no part of knowledge in fewer hands than that of discerning when to have done.

Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events.

Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

Real vision is the ability to see the invisible.

In all assemblies, though you wedge them ever so close, we may observe this peculiar property, that over their heads there is room enough; but how to reach it is the difficult point. To this end the philosopher's way in all ages has been by erecting certain edifices in the air.