My hours are peaceful centuries.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions.

The men who carry their points do not need to inquire of their constituents what they should say, but are themselves the country which they represent: nowhere are its emotions or opinions so instant and so true as in them; nowhere so pure from a selfish infusion.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.