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

What pity is it That we can die, but once to serve our country.

An honest private man often grows cruel and abandoned when converted into an absolute prince. Give a man power of doing what he pleases with impunity, you extinguish his fear, and consequently overturn in him one of the great pillars of morality.

In the loss of an object we do not proportion our grief to the real value it bears, but to the value our fancies set upon it.

Nature seems to have taken a particular care to disseminate her blessings among the different regions of the world, with an eye to their mutual intercourse and traffic among mankind, that the nations of the several parts of the globe might have a kind of dependence upon one another and be united together by their common interest.

Pedantry in learning is like hypocrisy inn religion--a form of knowledge without the power of it.

A good conscience is to the soul what health is to the body; it preserves constant ease and serenity within us; and more than countervails all the calamities and afflictions which can befall us from without.