The divine gift is ever the instant life, which receives and uses and creates, and can well bury the old in the omnipotency with which Nature decomposes all her harvest for recomposition.
Good as is discourse, silence is better and shames it.
Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the powers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age, – lasting as space and time, – embosomed in time and space.
Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.
The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.
Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.
I see that sensible men and conscientious men all over the world were of one religion of well-doing and daring.
The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.
The sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage.
In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.
An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand, till he is all gone.
A man must be in sympathy with society around him, or else, not wish to be in sympathy with it. If neither of these two, he must be wretched.
Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people’s estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.
Let not the author eat up the man, so that he shall be all balcony and no house.
What has been done in the world – the works of genius – cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.
The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.
The best picture makes us say, I am a painter also.
Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice. Up again, you shall never be so afraid of a tumble.
A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long before they have any science on the subject; and a beautiful face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration of the mechanical proportions of the features and head.