George Stillman Hillard Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Strategy is the most important department of the art of war, and strategical skill is the highest and rarest function of military genius.

George Stillman Hillard
There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp.

George Stillman Hillard
A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician.

George Stillman Hillard
Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

George Stillman Hillard
The shadow of human life is traced upon a golden ground of immortal hope.

George Stillman Hillard
Surely, the rainbow is a more glorious vision to him who comprehends the beautiful law by which its rich scarf is flung upon the dark skirts of the retiring storm.

George Stillman Hillard
Sunsets in themselves are generally superior to sunrises; but with the sunset we appreciate images drawn from departed peace and faded glory.

George Stillman Hillard
It may be too much to expect that nations should be governed in their relations towards each other by the precepts of Christian morality, but surely it is not too much to ask that they should conform to the code of courtesy and good breeding recognized among gentlemen in the intercourse of social life.

George Stillman Hillard
Man is an animal that cannot long be left in safety without occupation; the growth of his fallow nature is apt to run into weeds.

George Stillman Hillard
A sluggish, dawdling, and dilatory man may have spasms of activity, but he never acts continuously and consecutively with energetic quickness.

George Stillman Hillard
Ambition is not a weakness unless it be disproportioned to the capacity. To have more ambition than ability is to be at once weak and unhappy.

George Stillman Hillard
The stars are the poetry of heaven, but do they become its prose to the instructed eye, which sees in them, not points of gold upon a ground of blue, but worlds of beauty peopling the infinite depths of space?

George Stillman Hillard
The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.

George Stillman Hillard
Great men are among the best gifts which God bestows upon a people.

George Stillman Hillard
One might feel indignant at the injustice which deals out what is called fame with so unequal a hand, were it not for the reflection that men who are competent to add to the intellectual wealth of the world, and enlarge the domain of knowledge, have learned to take popular applause at its true value, and to find in the faithful discharge of honorable duty a satisfaction which is its own reward.

George Stillman Hillard
A great man is a gift, in some measure a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates. Indeed, without these, there would be no such thing as history, and the progress of a nation would be little worth recording, as the march of a trading caravan across a desert.

George Stillman Hillard
It seems to me that, if an undevout astronomer be mad, an unpoetical astronomer is monstrous.

George Stillman Hillard
A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments.

George Stillman Hillard
Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms.

George Stillman Hillard
The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

George Stillman Hillard