American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.

Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.