Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish.

Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

To know, to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic art, of which the best logic's can but babble on the surface.