What an enormous magnifier is tradition! How a thing grows in the human memory and in the human imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human heart, is there to encourage it

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

They have their belief, these poor Tibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, a belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds. This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.

The world is a thing that a man must learn to despise, and even to neglect, before he can learn to reverence it, and work in it and for it.