Christianity has ever been the enemy of human love; it has forever cursed and expelled and crucified the one passion which sweetens and smiles on human life, which makes the desert blossom as the rose, and which glorifies the common things and common ways of earth. It made of this, the angel of life, a shape of sin and darkness ... Even in the unions which it reluctantly permitted, it degraded and dwarfed the passion which it could not entirely exclude, and permitted it coarsely to exist for the mere necessity of procreation.

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

It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.

Hypocrites weep, and you cannot tell their tears from those of saints; but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet.

Histories in blazonry and poems in stone.

There is a self-evident axiom, that she who is born a beauty is half married.

There is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery.