That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Pain was not given thee merely to be miserable under; learn from it, turn it to account.

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

History after all is the true poetry.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.