A student may easily exhaust his life in comparing divines and moralists without any practical regard to morals and religion; he may be learning not to live but to reason... while the chief use of his volumes is unthought of, his mind is unaffected, and his life is unreformed.

It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour.

When we see our enemies and friends gliding away before us, let us not forget that we are subject to the general law of mortality, and shall soon be where our doom will be fixed forever.

To tell of disappointment and misery, to thicken the darkness of futurity, and perplex the labyrinth of uncertainty, has been always a delicious employment of the poets

Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past.

I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.