Why is youth so short and age so long?

Coleridge cried; "O God, how glorious it is to live!" Renan asks, "O God, when will it be worth while to live?" In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.

The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.

Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age--the only perfectly beautiful things on earth--joyous, innocent, half divine--useless, say they who are wiser than God.

The loss of our illusions is the only loss from which we never recover.

In its permission to man to render subject to him all other living creatures of the earth, it continued the cruelty of the barbarian and the pagan, and endowed these with what appeared a divine authority.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.