Science confounds everything; it gives to the flowers an animal appetite, and takes away from even the plants their chastity.

The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life.

How many books there are whose reputation is made that would not obtain it were it now to make?

Credulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.

Education should be gentle and stern, not cold and lax.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

We use up in the passions the stuff that was given us for happiness.