I feel ever so strongly that an artist must be nourished by his passions and his despairs. These things alter an artist whether for the good or the better or the worse. It must alter him. The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than the feeling of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch your whole sensibility.

Reading maketh a full man.

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.

No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out.

The genius of any single man can no more equal learning, than a private purse hold way with the exchequer.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.