Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.

As nations improve, so do their gods.

One has to do something new in order to see something new.

A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.

Of all the inventions of man I doubt whether any was more easily accomplished than that of a Heaven.