Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul.

Some degree of expression is necessary for growth, but it should be little in proportion to the full life.

The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it.

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is uncomparingly the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men.

Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily.