Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

History, if thoroughly comprehended, furnishes something of the experience which a man would acquire who should be a contemporary of all ages and a fellow citizen of all peoples.

There is a slowness in affairs which ripens them, and a slowness which rots them.

The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.

Nothing vivifies, and nothing kills, like the emotions.

Lofty mountains are full of springs; great hearts are full of tears.

Morality is the fruit of religion: to desire the former without the latter is to desire an orange without an orange-tree.