All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.

...I will praise the English climate till I die—even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair.