Praise never gives us much pleasure unless it concur with our own opinion, and extol us for those qualities in which we chiefly excel.
I never asserted such an absurd thing as that things arise without a cause.
It is with books as with women, where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging than that glare of paint and airs and apparel which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.
Custom is the great guide to human life.
A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.
The bigotry of theologians is a malady which seems almost incurable.
The imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects, which custom has rendered too familiar to it.
Habit may lead us to belief and expectation but not to the knowledge, and still less to the understanding, of lawful relations.
The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspence of judgment appear the only result of ourmost accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.
The law always limits every power it gives.
The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.
The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
Friendship is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit; springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations, without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion.
Nothing endears so much a friend as sorrow for his death. The pleasure of his company has not so powerful an influence.
What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.
Avarice, the spur of industry.
Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true sources of superstition. Hope, pride, presumption, a warm indignation, together with ignorance, are the true sources of enthusiasm.
Nothing is so improving to the temper as the study of the beauties either of poetry, eloquence, music, or painting.
It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.
The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.
It is a certain rule that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination.
All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us the by senses and experience.
Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.
In a vain man, the smallest spark may kindle into the greatest flame, because the materials are always prepared for it.
In ancient times, bodily strength and dexterity, being of greater use and importance in war, was also much more esteemed and valued, than at present. ... In short, the different ranks of men are, in a great measure, regulated by riches.
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