A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.