The "times," "the age" what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?

We animate what we can see, and we see only what we animate.

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

He, who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his hand.