The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.

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.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

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.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.