Love is the foolishness of men, and the wisdom of God.

Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star on his brow.

Taste is the common sense of genius.

It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.

Astronomy, that micography of heaven, is the most magnificent of the sciences. ... Astronomy has its clear side and its luminous side; on its clear side it is tinctured with algebra, on its luminous side with poetry.

Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.