The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.
