The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings

...most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

A garden is like those pernicious machineries which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in his arm, his leg , and his whole body to irresistible destruction.