Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.

It may be too much to expect that nations should be governed in their relations towards each other by the precepts of Christian morality, but surely it is not too much to ask that they should conform to the code of courtesy and good breeding recognized among gentlemen in the intercourse of social life.

Artists will sometimes speak of Rome with disparagement or indifference while it is before them but no artist ewer lived in Rome and then left it, without sighing to return.

A sluggish, dawdling, and dilatory man may have spasms of activity, but he never acts continuously and consecutively with energetic quickness.

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

There are no eyes so sharp as the eyes of hatred.

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments.

The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.

Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician.

For my boyhood's friend hath fallen, the pillar of my trust, The true, the wise, the beautiful, is sleeping in the dust.

The ruin of most men dates from some idle moment.

There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp.

The malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims are selfish, and whose means are indirect, cowardly, and treacherous.

If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.