I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.

The mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates the rose.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.

Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone's mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers.