I can't tell you if genius is hereditary, because heaven has granted me no offspring.

Art should be independent of all clap-trap - should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works 'arrangements' and 'harmonies.

Art happens-no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.

Can't a person be born where they want to be born?

Nature is usually wrong.

If silicon had been a gas I should have been a major-general.

The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter - perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain its presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.