Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

The peculiar essence of our banking system is an unprecedented trust between man and man. And when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

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

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

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