The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.

The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.

The immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and nothing more.

The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.