Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.