My thoughts are my company; I can bring them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them.

The happiest of pillows is not that which love first presses! it is that which death has frowned on and passed over.

It has been my fortune to love in general those men most who have thought most differently from me, on subjects wherein others pardon no discordance. I think I have no more right to be angry with a man, whose reason has followed up a process different from what mine has, and is satisfied with the result, than with one who has gone to Venice while I am at Siena, and who writes to me that he likes the place.

We are no longer happy so soon as we wish to be happier.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

I never did a single wise thing in the whole course of my existence, although I have written many which have been thought so.

I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.