Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation.

The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.

Things are achieved when they are well begun.

A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.