“The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.”

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Space is the stature of God.

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

To teach is to learn twice.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine – but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners; beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation.