Ideas can no more flow backward than can a river.

I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.

We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer.

When people look back at their childhood or youth, their wistfulness comes from the memory, not of what their lives had been in those years, but of what life had then promised to be. The expectation of some indefinable splendor, of the unusual, the exciting, the great is an attribute of youth and the process of aging is the process of that expectations' gradual extinction. One does not have to let it happen. But that fire dies for lack of fuel, under the gray weight of disappointments.

To know how to distinguish the agitation arising from covetousness, from the agitation arising from principles, to fight the one and aid the other, in this lies the genius and the power of great revolutionary leaders.

There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height.

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.