Government is emphatically a machine: to the discontented a taxing machine, to the contented a machine for securing property.

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

Does it ever give thee pause that men used to have a soul? Not by hearsay alone, or as a figure of speech, but as a thruth that they knew and acted upon. Verily it was another world then, but yet it is a pity we have lost the tidings of our souls. We shall have to go in search of them again or worse in all ways shall befall us.

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

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.