Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.