The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph.

The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?