Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.

When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.

The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.

I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.