It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

Intimates are predestined.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknownin America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.

[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.