In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.

The chief want, in every state that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants.

A gun will give you the body, not the bird

The cost of a thing is something called life which is given in exchange for it.

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,--as if the short spring days were an eternity.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?