There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgments as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who should condemn a criminal upon the account of his own choler; why then should fathers and pedants be any more allowed to whip and chastise children in their anger? It is then no longer correction bat revenge. Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and should we suffer a physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

I do not understand; I pause; I examine.

It is for little souls, that truckle under the weight of affairs, not to know how clearly to disengage themselves, and not to know how to lay them aside and take them up again.

How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.