If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Now the basest thought possible concerning man is, that he has no spiritual nature; and the foolishest misunderstanding of him possible is, that he has, or should have, no animal nature. For his nature is nobly animal, nobly spiritual,--coherently and irrevocably so; neither part of it may, but at its peril, expel, despise, or defy the other.