It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.

...perhaps there is some element of good even in the simple act of living, so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily.

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.