Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

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

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.