It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.

A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian──ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art.

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

It was not by gentle sweetness and self-abnegation that order was brought out of chaos; it was by strict method, by stern discipline, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labor, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

If this is dying I don't think much of it.

Happiness is the perpetual possession of being well deceived.