Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process──which is eternal, and must be felt for its own sake.

The stability and peace which seemed to be so firmly established by the brilliant monarchy of Francis I vanished with the terrible outbreak of the Wars of Religion.

Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing.

It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence is his capacity for making a summary.

Englishmen have always loved Moliere.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

The genius of the French language, descended from its single Latin stock, has triumphed most in the contrary direction - in simplicity, in unity, in clarity, and in restraint.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

Just because you do not know how they look like, doesn’t mean you cannot see them.

The most dangerous guy at my school-the lone person who makes me feel safe-is reveling in the way I am touching him.

I used to be able to write five pages a day, every day, no problem. Now a good day is five or four pages, and that's from 9:30 A.M. until 6 P.M.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else.

It is better to be a self-made man,--filled up according to God's original pattern,--than to be half a man, made after some other man's pattern.

I'm with you because I want to be with you

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.

The bully mind is not capable of loving or respecting others nor can it love or respect itself. Life's subtleties and the means of survival require its pretense of both these qualities.

Good humor is one of the preservatives of our peace and tranquility.

Blest be the art that can immortalize.