A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

Satan--the impersonation of that mixture of the bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute the fiend--the enemy of all that is human and divine.

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.

A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.