How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!

All our lives we are putting pennies — our most golden pennies — into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil's traps for artists.

We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.

How often my soul visits the National Gallery, and how seldom

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.