My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.