Wealth begins . . . in giving on all sides by tools and auxiliaries the greatest possible extension to our powers; as if it added feet and hands and eyes and blood. . . .

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.

Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common sense, - as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, - but the beauty and soul in his aspect . . . runs into fable, personifies every fact. . . .

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.

Mortal men ask God for good things every day, but they never pray that they may make good use of them.

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance.

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.