It is common to overlook what is near by keeping the eye fixed on something remote.

Among other pleasing errors of young minds is the opinion of their own importance. He that has not yet remarked, how little attention his contemporaries can spare from themselves, conceives all eyes turned upon himself, and imagines everyone that approaches him to be an enemy or a follower, an admirer or a spy.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

To dread no eye and to suspect no tongue is the great prerogative of innocence--an exemption granted only to invariable virtue.

Reason will by degrees submit to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.

Smoking is a shocking thing - blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us.

Men are most powerfully affected by those evils which themselves feel, or which appear before their own eyes.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties. He who easily comprehends all that is before him, and soon exhausts any single subject, is always eager for new inquiries; and in proportion as the intellectual eye takes in a wider prospect, it must be gratified with variety, by more rapid flights and bolder excursions.