A little grain of the romance is no ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious and low.

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

Promises and pie-crust are made to be broken.

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.

You should never be ashamed to admit you have been wrong. It only proves you are wiser today than yesterday

The sight of you is good for sore eyes.

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.

Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?""Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.

Every object holds a story.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of children.

The garden is growth and change and that means loss as well as constant new treasures to make up for a few disasters.

Why do comparisons of words and tone poems (poetry and music) never take into consideration that the word is a mere signifier, but that the sound, aside from being a signifier, is also an object?

The taste for splendor is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for the honorable.

These guys like each other almost as much as they like themselves.

I hate a messy closet. I totally freak out when my closet is messy and I can't find anything.

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

The strictest law often causes the most serious wrong