“If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.”

“Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.”

“Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one's pulse and taking one's temperature.”

“We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.”

“The enemy is still proud and powerful. He is hard to get at. He still possesses enormous armies, vast resources, and invaluable strategic territories...No one can tell what new complications and perils might arise in four or five more years of war. And it is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must reside.”

“The weary sun hath made a golden setAnd by the bright tract of his fiery carGives token of a goodly day to-morrow.”

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

“Even through the hollow eyes of deathI spy life peering.”

“Hither rolls the storm of heat;I feel its finer billows beatLike a sea which me infolds;Heat with viewless fingers moulds,Swells, and mellows, and matures,Paints, and flavors, and allures,Bird and brier inly warms,Still enriches and transforms,Gives the reed and lily length,Adds to oak and oxen strength,Transforming what it doth infold,Life out of death, new out of old.”

“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”

“Old & New put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion & the color of the flake: Antiquity, its form & properties. All things wear a luster which is the gift of the present & a tarnish of time.”

“My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.”

“O! that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come; But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known.”

“The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.”

“Be merry; you have cause, so have we all, of joy; for our escape is much beyond our loss . . . . then wisely weigh our sorrow with our comfort.”

“No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too, Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by the moon.”

“Well, every one can master a grief but he that has it.”

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”