English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,--when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?