Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.