No man does anything from a single motive.

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.

I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

Every human feeling is greater and larger than its exciting cause-a proof, I think, that man is designed for a higher state of existence.

You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.