“A judge at common law may be an ordinary man; a good judge of a carpet must be a genius.”

“The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.”

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.”

“in general, from the violation of a few simple laws of humanity arises the wretchedness of mankind - that as a species we have in our possession the as yet unwroght elements of content - and that, even now, in the present darkness and madness of all thought on the great question of social condition, it is not impossible that man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, my be happy”

“Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.”

“In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed.”

“...the question is of will, and not, as the insanity of logic has assumed, of power. It is not that the Deity cannot modify his laws, but that we insult him in imagining a possible necessity for modification.”