An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

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.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.