I once asked a hermit in Italy how he could venture to live alone, in a single cottage, on the top of a mountain, a mile from any habitation? He replied, that Providence was his next-door neighbor.

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.

It appears an extraordinary thing to me, that since there is such a diabolical spirit in the depravity of human nature, as persecution for difference of opinion in religious tenets, there never happened to be any inquisition, any auto da fe, any crusade, among the Pagans.

When a poor disconsolated drooping creature is terrified from all enjoyment,--prays without ceasing 'till his imagination is heated,--fasts and mortifies and mopes, till his body is in as bad a plight as his mind; is it a wonder, that the mechanical disturbancesof an empty belly, interpreted by an empty head, should be mistook for [the] workings [of God].

When the affections so kindly break loose, Joy, is another name for Religion.

We may imitate the Deity in all His attributes; but mercy is the only one in which we can pretend to equal Him. We cannot, indeed, give like God; but surely we may forgive like Him.

I am persuaded ... that both man and woman bear pain or sorrow, (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.