Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling...

I do not know the meaning of my sadness; there is an old fairy tale that I cannot get out of my mind.

While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we come to look on them as virtues.

Society is a republic. When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistable force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts.

First, I thought, almost despairing, This must crush my spirit now; Yet I bore it, and am bearing- Only do not ask me how.

Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion ... It becomes then an avowed mistress.