The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

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

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.