For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

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

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.