Power is sweet, and when you are a little clerk you love its sweetness quite as much as if you were an emperor, and maybe you love it a good deal more.

The radical defect in Christianity is that it tried to win the world by a bribe, and it has become a nullity.

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

No great talker ever did any great thing yet, in this world.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?