Talking with a friend is nothing else but thinking aloud.

Peaceable times are the best to live in, though not so proper to furnish materials for a writer.

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.

Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

Religion contracts the circle of our pleasures, but leaves it wide enough for her votaries to expatiate in.

Others proclaim the infirmities of a great man with satisfaction and complacence, if they discover none of the like in themselves.