Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
If one shed tears, they must be shed on one’s pillow.
My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can’t myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.
Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.
Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Intimates are predestined.
An artist’s business is only to see.
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.
No historian can take part with – or against – the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.