A splendour of miscellaneous spirits.

Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.

When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.

All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.

I had no companions to quarrel with, nobody to assist, and nobody to thank... the evil consequence of all this was not, however, what might perhaps have been expected, that I grew up selfish or non affectionate; but that, when affection did come, it came with a violence utterly rampant and unmanageable.

Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.