Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology.

Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.

One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble.

A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.