From Causes Which Appear Similar, We Expect

If We Confine Ourselves To A General And Distant Reflection On The Ills Of Human Life, That Can Have No Effect To Prepare Us For Them. If By Close And Intense Meditation We Render Them Present And Intimate To Us, That Is The True Secret For Poisoning All Our Pleasures, And Rendering Us Perpetually Miserable.

There Is No Such Thing As Freedom Of Choice Unless There Is Freedom To Refuse.

No Testimony Is Sufficient To Establish A Miracle, Unless The Testimony Be Of Such A Kind, That Its Falsehood Would Be More Miraculous Than The Fact Which It Endeavors To Establish.

Battles, Revolutions, Pestilence, Famine, And Death, Are Never The Effect Of Those Natural Causes, Which We Experience. Prodigies,omens, Oracles, Judgments, Quite Obscure The Few Natural Events, That Are Intermingled With Them. But As The Former Grow Thinner Every Pagewe Soon Learn, That There Is Nothing Mysterious Or Supernatural In The Case, But That All Proceeds From The Usual Propensity Of Mankind Towards The Marvellous, And That, Though This Inclination May At Intervals Receive A Check From Sense And Learning, It Can Never Be Thoroughly Extirpated.

Let Us Fix Our Attention Out Of Ourselves As Much As Possible; Let Us Chase Our Imagination To The Heavens, Or To The Utmost Limits Of The Universe; We Never Really Advance A Step Beyond Ourselves, Nor Can Conceive Any Kind Of Existence, But Those Perceptions, Which Have Appeared In That Narrow Compass.