We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

A man who tries to surpass another may perhaps succeed in equaling inot actually surpassing him, but one who merely follows can never quite come up with him: a follower, necessarily, is always behind.

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.

For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.

The gifts of nature are infinite in their variety, and mind differs from mind almost as much as body from body.

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.