We should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.

I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.

God knows what is my greatest happiness, but I do not. There is no rule about what is happy and good; what suits one would not suit another. And the ways by which perfection is reached vary very much; the medicines necessary for our souls are very different from each other. Thus God leads us by strange ways; we know He wills our happiness, but we neither know what our happiness is, nor the way. We are blind; left to ourselves we should take the wrong way; we must leave it to Him.

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.

How many writers are there... who, breaking up their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us of the whole by their anxiety about the parts.

All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from God.

Men will die upon dogma but will not fall victim to a conclusion.