Civil wars are the greatest of evils. They are inevitable, if we wish to reward merit, for all will say that they are meritorious.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.

We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.

Everyone, without exception, is searching for happiness.

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty... No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

Eloquence is the painting of thought.