No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

He who loves the bristle of bayonets only sees in the glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart. It is avarice and hatred; it is that quivering lip, that cold, hating eye, which built magazines and powder-houses.