Nothing can be done except little by little.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.