only example but discipline to initiate us in virtue.

We both read and hear bitter complaints about the uncertainty of human
affairs; and yet it is that uncertainty alone that gives life its relish,
for novelty is the real and radical cause of all our enjoyments.

There is a great outcry against fools on the part of the knaves, but
rather with some want of policy; for if there were no fools in the world
cunning men would have but a bad trade of it.

The faults of a fool are concealed from himself while they are evident to
the world; on the other hand the faults of the wise man are well known to
himself, while they are masked over and invisible to the world.

It has been said that "there is a pleasure in being mad that none but
madmen know;" but this only applies to that species of madness which is
produced by an excess of imagination eventually overpowering the judgment.

The insincerity of a friend has often inclined men to seek for a surer
reliance upon money; these unexpected shocks make us disgusted with our
species, and it is for this reason that old men who have seen so much of
the world become at last avaricious.

The only result an inquirer after truth can derive from metaphysics will
be to find himself silenced for the present; they rarely convince, and for
the most part mislead.

All the discoveries made within the last century were ridiculed and
treated with contempt by our forefathers; yet we are equally prejudiced
and hostile to all those improvements proposed to us, which will in all