Our reason may prove what it will: our reason is only a feeble ray that has issued from Nature.

The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

We possess only the happiness we able to understand.

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?.

When we lose one we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we loved not enough.

I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.

At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.