I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

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