Silence alone is great; all else is feebleness . . . Perform with all your heart your long and heavy task. . . . Then as do I, say naught, but suffer and die.

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

Oh, I have a habit of letting myself be lectured on the things I know best. I like to see if they are understood in the same way I understand; for there are many ways of knowing the same thing

I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.

Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy?