Whatever may be God’s future, we cannot forget His past.

Politics are always a struggle for power, disguised and modified by prudence, reason and moral pretext.

Civilisation is never so charming as when it is an island in the middle of simplicity, or of a civilisation of an alien kind.

Landscapes, even when their general type is similar, are capable of as many expressions as the same type of human face, and, without our being able fully to tell why, affect our spirits as we look at them with as many moods and meanings.

Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature.

If a man wishes to ensure the bad opinion of others, his best course probably is to be honest about himself.

Most of man's finest heroism is merely disguised necessity.

Was my guide a person who would expect what is vulgary called a "tip"? Or was his position so high that even to offer it would be an insult?

The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.