All disputation makes the mind deaf; and when people are deaf, I am dumb.

Fully to understand a grand and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.

Children must be rendered reasonable, but not reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey, and unreasonable for them to dispute.

A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural felicity and an acquired difficulty.

We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.

When the painter wishes to represent an event, he cannot place before us too great a number of personages; but he cannot employ too few when he wishes to portray an emotion.

Logic is to grammar what the sense of words is to their sound.