With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.

The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

Barbaric accuracy - whimpering humility.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

The wisdom of providence is as much revealed in the rarity of genius, as in the circumstance that not everyone is deaf or blind.