Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.

Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgment and friendship are like being enlivened.

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world.

There is no temper more unpropitious to interest than desultory application and unlimited inquiry, by which the desires are held in a perpetual equipoise, and the mind fluctuates between different purposes without determination.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of a larger meaning; he that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things, that he who never knew the original should not know the copies?