The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.

The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.

There is always a part of our being into which those who are dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.