It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by few elements, but by the highest complexity.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue.

Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.

Philanthropies and charities have a certain air of quackery.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

A man is a little thing whilst he works by and for himself, but, when he gives voice to the rules of love and justice, is godlike, his word is current in all countries; and all men, though his enemies, are made his friends and obey it as their own.

The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.