There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.
It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.
Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.
Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.
Is he weeping?” said the one with the softest heart.
It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.
In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.
Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.
It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted
A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.
There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.
What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.
He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, ‘I am not afraid.
What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.
In hatred as in love we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe we graft into our very soul.
How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?