A new degree of intellectual power seems cheap at any price.

All men are poets at heart. They serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes them sometimes.

A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.

I suppose you could never explain to the most ingenous molusk that such a creature as a whale existed.

The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.

If I have renounced the search of truth, if I have come into the port of some pretending dogmatism, some new church, some Schelling or Cousin, I have died to all use of these new events that are born out of prolific time into multitude of life every hour. I am as bankrupt to whom brilliant opportunities offer in vain. He has just foreclosed his freedom, tied his hands, locked himself up and given the key to another to keep.

As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man.