We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

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

A man who has tasted with profound enjoyment the pleasure of agreeable society will eat with a greater appetite than he who rode horseback for two hours. An amusing lecture is as useful for health as the exercise of the body.

The infinitude of creation is great enough to make a world, or a Milky Way of worlds, look in comparison with it what a flower or an insect does in comparison with the Earth.

Thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.

If an offender has committed murder, he must die. In this case, no possible substitute can satisfy justice. For there is no parallel between death and even the most miserable life, so that there is no equality of crime and retribution unless the perpetrator is judicially put to death.