Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.
Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.
It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to woman is her whole existence; she is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy.
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.
Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.
Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind.
Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.
To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.
The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.
Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest.
Nature seems to have poured forth her riches so without calculation, merely to mark the fullness of her joy.
I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.
The Greeks saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.
There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see I think that is enough to say about them...
Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom.
All great expression, which on a superficial survey seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it.
Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily.
I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue.