Man must be disappointed with the lesser things of life before he can comprehend the full value of the greater.

If aught be worse than failure from overstress of a life's prime purpose, it is to sit down content with a little success.

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for.

We are not such fools as to pay for reading inferior books, when we can read superior books for nothing.

The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth can contrast, by dignified silence, the garrulity of trivial minds, the more the world will give him credit for the wealth which he does not possess.