The shadow of human life is traced upon a golden ground of immortal hope.

Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.

A great man is a gift, in some measure a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates. Indeed, without these, there would be no such thing as history, and the progress of a nation would be little worth recording, as the march of a trading caravan across a desert.

Artists will sometimes speak of Rome with disparagement or indifference while it is before them; but no artist ewer lived in Rome and then left it, without sighing to return.

Sunsets in themselves are generally superior to sunrises; but with the sunset we appreciate images drawn from departed peace and faded glory.

The malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims are selfish, and whose means are indirect, cowardly, and treacherous.