The historian must be a poet; not to find, but to find again; not to breathe life into beings, into imaginary deeds, but in order to re-animate and revive that which has been; to represent what time and space have placed at a distance from us.

Friendship is the ideal; friends are the reality; reality always remains far apart from the ideal.

The man abandoned by his friends, one after another, without just cause, will acquire, the reputation of being hard to please, changeable, ungrateful, unsociable.

Nothing vivifies, and nothing kills, like the emotions.

The philosopher spends in becoming a man the time which the ambitious man spends in becoming a personage.

Like those statues which must be made larger than "nature" in order that, viewed from below, or from a distance, they may appear to be of the "natural" size, certain truths must be "strained" in order that the public may form a just idea of them.

Say nothing good of yourself, you will be distrusted; say nothing bad of yourself, you will be taken at your word.