the thousand tricks of conversation. With the
written word the case is still worse. No one cares to read anything to
which he is not already to some extent accustomed; he demands the known
and the familiar under an altered form. Still, the written word has this
advantage, that it lasts and can await the time when it is allowed to
take effect.

Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and
pay no attention to ours.

It is with history as with nature and with everything of any depth, it
may be past, present or future: the further we seriously pursue it, the
more difficult are the problems that appear.

Every phenomenon is within our reach if we treat it as an inclined
plane, which is of easy ascent, though the thick end of the wedge may be
steep and inaccessible.

If a man would enter upon some course of knowledge, he must either be
deceived or deceive himself, unless external necessity irresistibly
determines him. Who would become a physician if, at one and the same
time, he saw before him all the horrible sights that await him?

Literature is a fragment of fragments: the least of what happened and
was spoken, has been written; and of the things that have been written,
very few have been preserved.

And yet, with all the fragmentary nature of literature, we find
thousandfold repetition; which shows how limited is man's mind and
destiny.

We must remember that there are many men who, without being productive,
are anxious to say something important, and the results are most
curious.

Some books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to
let us know that the author has known something.

An author can show no greater respect for his public than by never
bringing it what it expects, but what he himself thinks right and proper
in that stage of his own and others' culture in which for the time he
finds himself.

That glorious hymn, _Veni Creator Spiritus_, is really an appeal to
genius. That is why it speaks so powerfully to men of intellect and
power.

Translators are like busy match-makers; they sing the praises of some
half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible
longing for the original.

My relations with Schiller rested on the decided tendency of both of us
toward a single aim, and our common activity rested on the diversity of
the means by which we endeavored to attain that aim.

The best that history gives us is the enthusiasm it arouses