Perform your long and heavy task with energy, treading the path to which Fate has been pleased to call you.

The study of social progress is to-day not less needed in literature than is the analysis of the human heart.

Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction?

Fainthearted animals move about in herds. The lion walks alone in the desert. Let the poet always walk thus.

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

Only silence is great; all else is weakness.

What it values most of all is the sum total of events and the advance of civilization, which carries individuals along with it; but, indifferent to details, it cares less to have them real than noble or, rather, grand and complete.