Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Art is a delayed echo.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.