People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.

A true university can never rest upon the will of one man. A true university always rests upon the wills of many divergent-minded old men, who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl in their kennels.

Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion.

The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.

One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, - to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to collect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct as to the enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

The power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge.