The choice of a topic which will bear analysis and support enthusiasm, is essential to the enjoyment of conversation.

The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.

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

If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.

Those persons are happiest in this restless and mutable world who are in love with change, who delight in what is new simply because it differs from what is old; who rejoice in every innovation, and find a strange alert pleasure in all that is, and that has never been before.

The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.

Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.