Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixtyou,--the trade drops at once: and this is the reasonwhy travellers have so little [good] conversation with natives,--owing to their [the natives'] suspicionthat there is nothing to be extracted from the conversationworth the trouble of their bad language.

I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pestered the world ever convince me to the contrary.

Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?

...beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes the plainest.

An atheist is more reclaimable than a papist, as ignorance is sooner cured than superstition.

A dwarf who brings a standard along with him to measure his own size, take my word, is a dwarf in more articles than one.

There are few instances of the exercise of particular virtues which seem harder to attain to, or which appear more amiable and engaging in themselves, than those of moderation and the forgiveness of injuries.