Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.

A word spoken in season, at the right moment; is the mother of ages.

The modern majesty consists in work. What a man can do is his greatest ornament, and he always consults his dignity by doing it.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

If there be not a religious element in the relations of men, such relations are miserable and doomed to ruin.

These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.