Our modern wars make many unhappy while they last and none happy when they are over.

Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.

The philosophers must station themselves in the middle.

Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

Who is the most sensible person? The one who finds what is to their own advantage in all that happens to them.

Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look around.

The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peaks of art, the other to its lowest depths.