The soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real

Nature has made a pebble and a female. The lapidary makes the diamond, and the lover makes the woman.

Caution is the eldest child of wisdom.

Everything speaks: the flowing airstream and the sailing halycon, the blade of grass, the flower, the bud, the element; did you imagine the universe to be otherwise?

Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

Monsieur' to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea; ignominy thirsts for respect.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.