Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

Be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts, in all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this--that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

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.