Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds: Men live on the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never enter, and with their hand on the doorlatch they die outside.

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.

Human beings cannot endure the geological chaos they encounter under the soil of their own gardens.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea.