A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.

Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.

Genius is only a superior power of seeing.

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

As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite--variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite--energy. It is the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin