A grain of real knowledge, of genuine controllable conviction, will outweigh a bushel of adroitness; and to produce persuasion there is one golden principle of rhetoric not put down in the books-to understand what you are talking about.

History is the school of statesmanship.

No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable.

History without politics descends to mere Literature.