The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.

To spend life for something which outlasts it.

An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system

Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

You can't out-perform your self-image.