A religious hope does not only bear up the mind under her sufferings but makes her rejoice in them.

The memory is perpetually looking back when we have nothing present to entertain us. It is like those repositories in animals that are filled with food, on which they may ruminate when their present pastures fail.

Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.

Ridicule is generally made use of to laugh men out of virtue and good sense, by attacking everything praiseworthy in human life.

The voice of reason is more to be regarded than the bent of any present inclination; since inclination will at length come over to reason, though we can never force reason to comply with inclination.

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.

Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.