A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavoring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.

If those gentlemen would let me alone I should be much obliged to them. I would say, as Shakespeare would say... ''Sweet Friend, for Jesus sake forbear.''

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.