We should learn, by reflecting on the misfortunes which have attended others, that there is nothing singular in those which befall ourselves. [They have, are and will be experienced by others as well as worse.]

Conversation opens our views, and gives our faculties a more vigorous play it puts us upon turning our notions on every side, and holds them up to a light that discovers those latent flaws which would probably have lain concealed in the gloom of unagitated abstraction.

I look upon enthusiasm, in all other points but that of religion, to be a very necessary turn of mind as indeed it is a vein which nature seems to have marked with more or less strength, in the tempers of most men. No matter what the object is, whether business, pleasures or the fine arts: whoever pursues them to any purpose must do so con amore.

A copious manner of expression gives strength and weight to our ideas, which frequently make impression upon the mind, as iron does upon solid bodies, rather by repeated strokes than a single blow.