Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.

My mother was kept very busy with her sewing; sometimes she would have another woman helping her.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience.

I thought of Paris as a beauty spot on the face of the earth, and of London as a big freckle.

My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that after all I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage