Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Persons in great stations have seldom their true character drawn till several years after their death. Their personal friendships and enmities must cease, and the parties they were engaged in be at an end, before their faults or their virtues can have justice done them. When writers have the least opportunities of knowing the truth, they are in the best disposition to tell it.

Our disputants put me in mind of the cuttlefish that, when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens the water about him till he becomes invisible.

Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable.

The lives of great men cannot be writ with any tolerable degree of elegance or exactness within a short time after their decease.