The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies...

We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty

There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease.

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.

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.