If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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

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.

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

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.

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.