All duties are matters of conscience, with this restriction that a superior obligation suspends the force of an inferior one.

Passions, as fire and water, are good servants, but bad masters, and subminister to the best and worst purposes.

We never think of the main business of life till a vain repentance minds us of it at the wrong end.

It is one of the vexatious mortifications of a studious man to have his thoughts disordered by a tedious visit.

The lowest boor may laugh on being tickled, but a man must have intelligence to be amused by wit.

What man in his right senses, that has wherewithal to live free, would make himself a slave for superfluities? What does that man want who has enough? Or what is he the better for abundance that can never be satisfied.

The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.