The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
Good men do the most harm.
He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence – of talking without meaning – is never effaced.
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
History is only a value of relation.
My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.
Nothing is easier to teach than historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Friends are born, not made.
As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.