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

Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles. The ancient lawyers used to quote at the bar till they had stagnated their own cause.

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.

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.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius-the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

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

Self-love is a principle of action; but among no class of human beings has nature so profusely distributed this principle of life and action as through the whole sensitive family of genius.