The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from breaking, learn this lesson once for all you must cease, in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like ourselves.
To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.
We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages hy the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living prophet. Small honour for you if they do build it; and may be they never will build it.
We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.
Crime is not punished as an offense against God, but as prejudicial to society.
You cannot reason people into loving those whom they are not drawn to love; they cannot reason themselves into it; and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too strong even for the obligations of relationship.
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
Our thoughts and our conduct are our own.
Women’s eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.
A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.
The trials of life will not wait for us. They come at their own time, not caring much to inquire how ready we may be to meet them.
Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason must forswear.
We call heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it.
There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease.
It often seems to me as if History was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.
It remains a lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.