History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.

Let me have my own way in exactly everything and a sunnier and pleasanter creature does not exist.

If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life; in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at little. And in the course of years when you come to look back, if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers,-and among many counsellors there is wisdom,-you will bitterly repent when it is too late.

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.

The battle that never ends is the battle of belief against disbelief

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.