To genius life never grows commonplace.

Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it.

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern.