“Soon is the struggle past, and to the earth, To the eternal sun, I render back These atoms, joined in me for pain and pleasure.”

Life is earnest, art is gay.

As inclination changes, thus ebbs and flows the unstable tide of public judgment.

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.

Intellect-brain force.

You have to go the rounds from individual to individual in order to gather the totality of the race.

On dreary night let lusty sunshine fall.

What else is chance but the rude stone which receives its life from the sculptor’s hand? Providence gives us chance, and man must mould it to his own designs.

Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.

Joy all creatures drink At nature’s bosoms.

Foster the beautiful, and every hour thou tallest new flowers to birth.

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

The gentlest man cannot live in peace if it does not please his wicked neighbor.

It would be necessary that they should be already sages to love wisdom.

It is difficult to discriminate the voice of truth from amid the clamor raised by heated partisans.

Misery travels free through the whole world!

Historians are prophets with their face turned backward.

The plant kingdom covers the entire earth, offering our senses great pleasure and the delights of summer.

Quietly they moved down the calm and sacred river that had come down to earth so that its waters might flow over the ashes of those long dead, and that would continue to flow long after the human race had, through hatred and knowledge, burned itself out.

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

Our Constitution is the envy of the world, as it should be for it is the grand design of the finest nation on earth.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

All sorts of flowers the which on earth do spring In goodly colours gloriously arrayed; Go to my love, where she is careless laid.

Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee.