Women stand related to beautiful nature around us, and the enamoured youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind: teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult.

Morality is the object of government.

Things refuse to be mismanaged for long.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.