I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.