Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation.

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?