As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

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.

One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.