It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

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

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.