What is reading but silent conversation?

We care not how many see us in choler, when we rave and bluster, and make as much noise and bustle as we can; but if the kindest and most generous affection comes across us, we suppress every sign of it, and hide ourselves in nooks and covert.

Solitude is the audience-chamber of God.

Everything that looks to the future elevates human nature; for never is life so low or so little as when occupied with the present.

In honest truth, a name given to a man is no better than a skin given to him; what is not natively his own falls off and comes to nothing.

There is a desire of property in the sanest and best men, which Nature seems to have implanted as conservative of her works, and which is necessary to encourage and keep alive the arts.

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.