If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute.

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.

The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon.

The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair.

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.