“Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.”

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

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.