Why is youth so short and age so long?

Imagination without culture is crippled and moves slowly; but it can be pure imagination, and rich also, as folk-lore will tell the vainest.

The bread of bitterness is the food on which men grow to their fullest stature; the waters of bitterness are the debatable ford through which they reach the shores of wisdom; the ashes boldly grasped and eaten without faltering are the price that must be paid for the golden fruit of knowledge.

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.

The song that we hear with our ears is only the song that is sung in our hearts.

Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!