The greatest event for the world is the arrival of a new and wise person.
Eternity looks grander and kinder if time grow meaner and more hostile.
Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.
Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?
All great peoples are conservative.
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.
One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.
Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.
To us also, through every star, through every blade of grass, is not God made visible if we will open our minds and our eyes.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
The cut of a garment speaks of intellect and talent and the color of temperament and heart.
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.
Be not a slave of words.