Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belie… - Thomas Hardy

Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!… Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection

His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.