It is not customary to love what one has.

What we call strategy is mainly just crossing rivers on bridges and passing mountains though cols.

A good critic is the man who describes his adventures among masterpieces.

The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.

In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

We find it hard to picture to ourselves the state of mind of a man of older days who firmly believed that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that all the heavenly bodies revolved around it. He could feel beneath his feet the writhings of the damned amid the flames; very likely he had seen with his own eyes and smelt with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissure in the rocks. Looking upwards, he beheld ... the incorruptible firmament, wherein the stars hung like so many lamps.