Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.

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

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

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

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.