Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...