I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

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.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.

Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.

We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative.

This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.