It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

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.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.