God help us! it is a foolish little thing, this human life, at the best; and it is half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it, and to its little ornaments and distinctions.
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence.
The cheat ambition, eager to espouse dominion, courts it with a lying show, and shines in borrowed pomp to serve a turn.
Nothing is so firmly than that which is least known.
He will always see the most beauty whose affections are the warmest and most exercised, whose imagination is the most powerful, and who has most accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he is surrounded.
An obligation is something which constrains or induces us to act.
There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious as of the extent and strength of his prejudices.
Derision is never so agonizing as when it pounces on the wanderings of misguided sensibility.
Simplicity of manner is the last attainment. Men are very long afraid of being natural, from the dread of being taken for ordinary.
Satire is a composition of salt and mercury; and it depends upon the different mixture and preparation of those ingredients, that it comes out a noble medicine, or a rank poison.
The disease and its medicine are like two factions in a besieged town; they tear one another to pieces, but both unite against their common enemy, Nature.
Damn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself.
