The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.
A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works.
Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.
The Englishman who has lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.
A scholar is a man with his inconvenience, that, when you ask him his opinion of any matter, he must go home and look up his manuscripts to know.
Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age.
Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends.
We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future, but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.
The vanishing, volatile froth of the present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every moment converted into the adamantine.
Is there a difference? Yes. We are in harmony with nature, but never at peace.
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
Always scorn appearances and you always may.
The wise man always throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point.
Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.
It is not the irregular hours or irregular diet that makes the romantic life.
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in.
The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanity’s.
Every man is an infinitely repelling orb, and holds his individual being on that condition.
The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.
An original sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.