The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed

It is defeat which educates us.

We live ruins amid ruins.

Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, and boasts each month a new ornament.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.