Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.
It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.
There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.