People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.

There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its side.

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.