A statesman makes the occasion, but the occasion makes the politician.

If liberty with law is fire on the hearth, liberty without law is fire on the floor.

There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp.

The ruin of most men dates from some idle moment.

A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments.

Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms.

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon.