Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.