A man cannot have an idea of perfection in another, which he was never sensible of in himself.

I love to consider an Infidel, whether distinguished by the title of deist, atheist, or free-thinker.

Compassion does not only refine and civilize human nature, but has something in it more pleasing and agreeable, than what can be met with in such an indolent happiness, such an indifference to mankind, as that in which the stoics placed their wisdom. As love is the most delightful passion, pity is nothing else but love softened by a degree of sorrow: In short, it is a kind of pleasing anguish, anguish as well as generous sympathy, that knits mankind together, and blends them in the same common lot.

Age in a virtuous person, of either sex, carries in it an authority which makes it preferable to all the pleasures of youth.

It is a wonderful thing that so many, and they not reckoned absurd, shall entertain those with whom they converse by giving them the history of their pains and aches and imagine such narrations their quota of conversation.

A lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.

I cannot think of any character below the flatterer, except he who envies him