What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.

To some characters, fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do well to turn away from it who fear it will turn their heads. But to others fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love in its widest, most exalted sense.

A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.

Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals.

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

Nature is boundless in her powers, exhausting in her variety: the powers of Art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite Art. The one is the divinity; the other the priestess.

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.