Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.

A circle may be small, yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one.

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit, persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers.

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract. Whenever the mind of a writer is saturated with the full inspiration of a great author, a quotation gives completeness to the whole; it seals his feelings with undisputed authority.

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.