The appetites will rule if the mind is vacant.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.

What, but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to save himself from the dark torments of purgatory.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

We cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.