Conquest is the missionary of valor, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.

The great pleasure of life is doing for pleasure things I do not like to do.

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.

An ambassador is not simply an agent; he is also a spectacle.