A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.