The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

Intimates are predestined.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of...

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

Good men do the most harm.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the...

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.