A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician

No man can be a great officer who is not infinitely patient of details, for an army is an aggregation of details, a defect in any one of which may destroy or impair the whole. It is a chain of innumerable links, but the whole chain is no …

Sooner or later the world comes round to see the truth and do the right.

Anger is a fierce and sudden flame, which may be kindled in the noblest breasts; but in these the slow droppings of an unforgiving temper never take the shape and consistency of enduring hatred.

Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.

Men of genius are more apt to feel art than to understand it; and they sometimes mistake that emotion which a work of art calls forth for essential characteristics of the work itself.

One might feel indignant at the injustice which deals out what is called fame with so unequal a hand, were it not for the reflection that men who are competent to add to the in-tellectual wealth of the world, and enlarge the domain of …