I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)

Hope- the recognition, by true foresight, of better things to be reached here after.

There are many religions, but there is only one morality.

There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible..... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.

It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately.

Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.