“Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.”

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.