Beauty and art pervade all the business of life like a kindly genius, brightly adorning our surroundings whether interior or exterior, mitigating the seriousness of existence and the complexities of the real life, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining fashion, and, where there is nothing good to be achieved, filling the place of vice better than vice itself.

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.

Genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right - two equally justified ethical principles embodied in people of unchangeable will.

The courage of the truth is the first condition of philosophic study.

Philosophy is the history of philosophy.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom