In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts And power to him who power exerts; Hast not thy share? On winged feet, Lo! it rushes thee to meet; . . .

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.

[The imagination] . . . inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and . . . a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.

The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?