We must make up our minds to be ignorant of much, if we would know anything.

A great memory is never made synonymous with wisdom, any more than a dictionary would be called a treatise.

It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.

Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

Great things are done by devotion to one idea.

Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it.

Time hath a taming hand.