The lively phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on them grave reflections.
What a man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.
To reason, to argue. It is to walk with crutches in search of the truth. We come to it with a leap.
How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.
TIME and truth are friends, though there are many moments hostile to truth.
Some superior minds are unrecognized because there is no standard by which to weigh them.
The Bible is to religion what the Iliad is to poetry.
You have to be like the pebble in the stream, keeping the grain and rolling along without being dissolved or dissolving anything else.
There is always some frivolity in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, but also stray.
It is always our inabilities that vex us.
In really good acting we should be able to believe that what we hear and see is of our own imagining; it should seem to be to us as a charming dream.
All good verses are like impromptus made at leisure.
The sound of the drum drives out thought; for that very reason it is the most military of instruments.
We should make ourselves loved, for men are only just towards those whom they love.
Our life is woven wind.
Justice is the right of the weakest.
Heaven is for those who think of it.
We know God easily, if we do not constrain ourselves to define him.
The idea of the nest in the bird’s mind, where does it come from?
We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.
Monuments are the grappling-irons that bind one generation to another...