Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

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

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.