The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

We cannot feel strongly toward the totally unlike because it is unimaginable, unrealizable; nor yet toward the wholly like because it is stale - identity must always be dull company. The power of other natures over us lies in a stimulating difference which causes excitement and opens communication, in ideas similar to our own but not identical, in states of mind attainable but not actual.

We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.