“Admiration is a very short lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object, unless it still be fed with fresh discoveries, and kept alive by a new perpetual succession of miracles rising up to its view.”

True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.

It is not the business of virtue to extirpate the affections of the mind, but to regulate them.

Soon as the evening shades prevail, The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.

Look what a little vain dust we are!

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them, that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves.

To be exempt from the passions with which others are tormented, is the only pleasing solitude.

Wit is the fetching of congruity out of incongruity.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

When all thy mercies, O my God, My rising soul surveys, Transported with the view I’m lost, in wonder, love and praise.

Nature in her whole drama never drew such a part; she has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man’s own making.

When I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves,

Animals, in their generation, are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass.

We all had to learn how to do it. So it’s just something creative people need to get familiar with… not really so scary.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

We fear leaving those familiar surroundings, which is natural, but through exploration of the unfamiliar we stop focusing on the labels that define WHAT we are and discover WHO we are.

I never perceived a contradiction in the political revolutionary field between the ideas I maintained and the idea of that symbol, that extraordinary figure who had been so familiar to me since I began to reason.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

Anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.’ I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

All objects lose by too familiar a view.