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

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.