Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood. The commonest way in which we deceive either ourselves or others about understanding is by assuming something as familiar, and accepting it on that account; with all its pros and cons, such knowing never gets anywhere, and it knows not why.... The analysis of an idea, as it used to be carried out, was, in fact, nothing else than ridding it of the form in which it had become familiar.

Too fair to worship, too divine to love.

Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself.

People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.

The Catholics had been in the position of oppressors, and the Protestants of the oppressed

Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.