There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

You must hear the birds song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.

Such is the active power of good temperament! Great sweetness of temper neutralizes such vast amounts of acid.

If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it.

We must be lovers, and at once the impossible becomes possible.

The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and largercircles, and that without end.

With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house.