With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once.

Also our fellow competitors, who are indeed the people just mentioned - we do not compete with men who lived a hundred centuries ago, or those yet not born, or the dead, or those who dwell near the Pillars of Hercules, or those whom, in our opinion or that of others, we take to be far below us or far above us. So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves; we compete with our rivals in sport or in love, and generally with those who are after the same things; and it is therefore these whom we are bound to envy beyond all others. Hence the saying.

The true nature of a thing is the highest it can become.

Some believe it to be just friends wanting, as if to be healthy enough to wish health.

There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.

A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence...makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.