We must not attach knowledge to the mind, we have to incorporate it there.

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

We hold death, poverty, and grief for our principal enemies; but this death, which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not know that others call it the only secure harbor from the storm and tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of liberty, and the common and sudden remedy of all evils?

We are born to inquire into truth; it belongs to a greater to possess it

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--isnothing but dreams and smoke.

The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.