To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

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.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.