You may regret calamities if you can thereby help the sufferer, but if you cannot, mind your own business.

Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men or they are no better than dreams.

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

The State is a poor, good beast who means the best: it means friendly.