The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.

He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with; as if, observes our author himself, any originality but our own could be expected to content us! In fact all strange thing are apt, without fault of theirs, to estrange us at first view, and unhappily scarcely anything is perfectly plain, but what is also perfectly common.

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

What is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.