Music is the poor man's Parnassus.

The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.

Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, for ever.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

Time is indeed the theater and seat of illusions; nothing is so ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and dwarfs an age to an hour.

When a man meets his make, society begins.

Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.