A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.