“The right, indeed, is indestructible. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be Teutonic. Kings waste their energies in that contention, and lose their honour. Sooner or later the submerged nation rises again to the surface; Greece is still Greece and Italy, Italy... The theft of a people can never be justified. These august swindles have no future. A nation cannot be shaped as though it were a pocket handkerchief.”

“The modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India for its vehicle; Alexander upon the elephant.”

“What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?”

“It may indeed be said that the word is never a more splendid mystery than when it travels in a man's mind from thought to conscience and back again to thought.”

“to all those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: "Soldiers, you are in need of everything; the enemy has it.”

“The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”

“It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory”