The delicate muses lose their head if their attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, you would not come back to your bookshelf and your task. When the spirit chooses you for its scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you odious to men and men odious to you, and you shall accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those questions though you die.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.

There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.

Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference.

The miracles of genius always rest on profound convictions which refuse to be analyzed.