Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skinsand furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.

The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

Be assured that it gives much more pain to the mind to be in debt, than to do without any article whatever which we may seem to want.

Of all exercises, walking is the best.

The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters.