Every natural action is graceful.

It's a luxury to be understood.

We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate thier virtue or vice by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath ever moment....One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zsig zag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficent distance and it straightens itslef to the average tendency.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

An actually existing fly is more important than a possibly existing angel.

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life.