Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

Curiosity, like all other desires, produces pain as well as pleasure.

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.

No one is much pleased with a companion who does not increase, in some respect, their fondness for themselves.

Age is rarely despised but when it is, contemptible.

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.