The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

The temple of silence and reconciliation.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

Language is the machine of the poet.