Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.

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

A traveler's chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad-as well as good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

The greatest Inventions were produced in Times of Ignorance; as the Use of the Compass, Gunpowder, and Printing; and by the dullest Nation, as the Germans.

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors.

There is no vice which mankind carries to such wild extremes as that of avarice.