In love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies from us.

Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?

I look upon the too good opinion that man has of himself, as the nursing mother of all false opinions, both public and private.

If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad?

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

We have power over nothing except our will.

We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning.