Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness.

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.

I would fain ask one of these bigotted Infidels, supposing all the great Points of Atheism... were laid together and formed into a kind of Creed, according to the Opinions of the most celebrated Atheists; I say, supposing such a Creed as this were formed, and imposed upon any one People in the World, whether it would not require an infinitely greater Measure of Faith, than any Set of Articles which they so violently oppose.

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.

A source of cheerfulness to a good mind is the consideration of that Being on whom we have our dependence, and in whom, though we behold Him as yet but in the first faint discoveries of His perfections, we see everything that we can imagine as great glorious, or amiable. We find ourselves everywhere upheld by His goodness and surrounded by an immensity of love and mercy.

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.

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: 'What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.'