Rain is good for vegetables, and for the animals who eat those vegetables, and for the animals who eat those animals.

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.

All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.

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.

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.

He that resigns his peace to little casualties, and suffers the course of his life to be interrupted for fortuitous inadvertencies or offences, delivers up himself to the direction of the wind, and loses all that constancy and equanimity which constitutes the chief praise of a wise man.