Over the times thou hast no power. . . . Solely over one man thou hast quite absolute power. Him redeem and make honest.

Happy season of virtuous youth, when shame is still an impassable barrier, and the sacred air-cities of hope have not shrunk into the mean clay hamlets of reality; and man, by his nature, is yet infinite and free.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

History is the new poetry.

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.