Formerly it was the fashion to preach the natural; now it is the ideal. People too often forget that these things are profoundly compatible; that in a beautiful work of imagination the natural should be ideal, and the ideal natural.

That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting.

In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.

Authorship is, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, an infamy, a pastime, a day-labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, a virtue.

Egotism erects its center in itself; love places it out of itself in the axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotismat solitude. Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot in a devastated creation.