It is a new kind of sacrament....

Society ordains that the bones and blood of one being shall be changed into the bones and blood of another.

It is the greatest of all legal acts.
It gives the sentiments of a son to one who never had them, and reciprocally those of a parent.

Where ought this to originate?
From on high, like a clap of thunder!" All his expressions are bright flashes one after another.[1164] Nobody, since Voltaire and Galiani, has launched forth such a profusion of them; on society, laws, government, France and the French, some penetrate and explain, like those of Montesquieu, as if with a flash of lightening.
He does not hammer them out laboriously, but they burst forth, the outpourings of his intellect, its natural, involuntary, constant action.
And what adds to their value is that, outside of councils and private conversations, he abstains from them, employing them only in the service of thought; at other times he subordinates them to the end he has in view, which is always their practical effect.

Ordinarily, he writes and speaks in a different language, in a language suited to his audience; he dispenses with the oddities, the irregular improvisations and imagination, the outbursts of genius and inspiration.