“Earnestness is the salt of eloquence.”

“Kings are for nations in their swaddling-clothes: France has attained her majority.”

“In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac.”

“The poetic element lying hidden in most women is the source of their magnetic attraction.”

“Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.”

“I am giddy, expectation whirls me round.The imaginary relish is so sweetThat it enchants my sense.”

“Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.”

“The sweets we wish for, turn to loathed sours,Even in the moment that we call them ours.”