Digressions incontestably are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.

Whatever stress some may lay upon it, a death-bed repentance is but a weak and slender plank to trust our all on.

When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage - that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain.

The way to fame, is like the way to heaven,--through much tribulation.

There is not a greater paradox in nature,--than that so good a religion [as Christianity] should be no better recommended by its professors.

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 begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.