It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated.

You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.

It is a shallow criticism that would define poetry as confined to literary productions in rhyme and meter rhythm. The written poem is only poetry talking, and the statue, the picture, and the musical composition are poetry acting. Milton and Goethe, at their desks, were not more truly poets than Phidias with his chisel, Raphael at his easel, or deaf Beethoven bending over his piano, inventing and producing strains, which he himself could never hope to hear.

Such help as we can give to each other in this world is a debt to each other; and the man who perceives a superiority or a capacity in a subordinate, and neither confesses nor assists it, is not merely the withholder of kindness, but the committer of injury.

True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.

When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

No picture can be good which deceives by its imitation, for the very reason that nothing can be beautiful which is not true.