Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.

However good you may be you have faults; however dull you may be you can find out what some of them are, and however slight they may be you had better make some - not too painful, but patient efforts to get rid of them.

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.

Wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened pre-eminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.

The best work never was and never will be done for money.

It is better to be nobly remembered than nobly born.

Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up.