The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.