The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again

America is a young country with an old mentality.

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

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

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