It is easier to make a lady of a peasant-girl than a peasant-girl of a lady.

Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.

Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity.

Have you never observed that children will sometimes, of a sudden, give utterance to ideas which makes us wonder how they got possession of them? Which presuppose a long series of other ideas and secret self-communings? Which break forth like a full stream out of the earth, an infallible sign that the stream was not produced in a moment from a few raindrops, but had long been flowing concealed beneath the ground?

The working of revolutions misleads me no more; it is as necessary to our race as its waves to the stream, that it may not be a stagnant marsh. Ever renewed in its forms, the genius of humanity blossoms.

All our science calculates with abstracted individual external marks, which do not touch the inner existence of any single thing

The roots of the deepest love die in the heart, if not tenderly cherished.