Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

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.

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.