If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.

Knowledge is pleasure as well as power.

To die is only to be as we were before we were born; yet no one feels any remorse, or regret, or repugnance, in contemplating this last idea.

Nothing gives such a blow to friendship as the detecting another in an untruth. It strikes at the root of our confidence ever after.

Hope is the best possession.

Our notions with respect to the importance of life, and our attachment to it, depend on a principle which has very little to do with its happiness or its misery. The love of life is, in general, the effect not of our enjoyments, but of our passions.

We imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.