There is nothing which one regards so much with an eye of mirth and pity as innocence when it has in it a dash of folly.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

Advertisements are of great use to the vulgar. First of all, as they are instruments of ambition. A man that is by no means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the advertisements; by which means we often see an apothecary in the same paper of news with a plenipotentiary, or a running footman with an ambassador.

Devotion, when it does not lie under the check of reason, is apt to degenerate into enthusiasm.

There is something very sublime, though very fanciful, in Plato's description of the Supreme Being,--that truth is His body and light His shadow. According to this definition there is nothing so contradictory to his nature as error and falsehood.

Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us incapable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.

A jealous man is very quick in his application: he knows how to find a double edge in an invective, and to draw a satire on himself out of a panegyrick on another.