«The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.»

«That there should one man die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy.»

«A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.»

«These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one century, - is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Granada! I said, the Great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; th»

«Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.»

«No person was every rightly understood until they had been first regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance, but of sympathy.»

«We were wise indeed, could we discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position in it. Let us, instead of gazing idly into the obscure distance, look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves; whereby our own relations to it, our own true aims and endeavors in it, may also become clearer.»

«Sarcasm is the language of the devil, for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it»

«There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write»

«The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very»