To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

A simple life is its own reward.

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.