“The student is to read history actively not passively.”

“I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.”

“The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul”

“All history is biography.”

“There is properly no history; only biography.”

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”

“One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. ”