The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.

Nature never gives everything at once.

The hopes of zeal are not wholly groundless.

I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.

He that can swim needs not despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of resistance to the different density of matter through which we are to pass. You will be necessarily upborne by the air if you can renew any impulse upon it faster than the air can recede from the pressure.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.