The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law.

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.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.

All things are known to the soul.

What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.