Friendship needs to be rooted in respect, but love can live upon itself alone

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

Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.

Music is not a science any more than poetry is. It is a sublime instinct, like genius of all kinds.

Who has passed by the fates of disillusion has died twice.

Could we see when and where we are to meet again, we would be more tender when we bid our friends goodbye.

Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.