Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations

My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.