The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Four varieties in society: lovers, the ambitious, observers, and fools. The fools are the happiest.

A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.

History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross.

The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

In the stormy current of life characters are weights or floats which at one time make us glide along the bottom, and at another maintain us on the surface.