I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.

To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame

Greatness is the dream of youth realized in old age.

The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man.