Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?

When the Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he impresses his will in the structure of minds.

Liberty is a slow fruit.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.

We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

True wit never made us laugh.