The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.

There is no slight danger from general ignorance; and the only choice which Providence has graciously left to a vicious government is either to fall by the people, if they are suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept enslaved and ignorant.

To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

A religion, that is, a true religion, must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere Philosophy; - nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are symbols, or out of which they arise, or upon which they are grounded: for then it would be mere History.

The fastidious taste will find offence in the occasional vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our writers seem to have affected.