The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgment of reason, and perverts its liberty.

Suicide is not abominable because God prohibits it; God prohibits it because it is abominable.

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

Imagination is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.