A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principle subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

What a strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known are better than the things we have known.

Pointed axioms and acute replies fly loose about the world, and are assigned successively to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate.

He that wishes to see his country robbed of its rights cannot be a patriot.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity... The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.