God had infinite time to give us.... He cut it up into a near succession of new mornings, and, with each, therefore, a new idea, new inventions, and new applications.

There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest return of wisdom.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.