The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

How little praise warms out of a man the good that is in him, as the sneer of contempt which he feels is unjust chill the ardor to excel.

Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.

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

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.

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.

Genius, the Pythian of the beautiful, leaves its large truths a riddle to the dull.