There is nothing touches our imagination so much as a beautiful woman in a plain dress.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some notorious weaknesses and infirmities.

A man's first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart; his next, to escape the censures of the world: if the last interferes with the former, it ought to be entirely neglected; but otherwise there cannot be a greater satisfaction to an honest mind, than to see those approbations which it gives itself seconded by the applauses of the public.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses.

When a man has been guilty of any vice or folly, the best atonement he can make for it is to warn others not to fall into the like.

Supposing all the great points of atheism were formed into a kind of creed, I would fain ask whether it would not require an infinite greater measure of faith than any set of articles which they so violently oppose.