Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can — it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.