Who can . . . guess how much industry and providence and affection we have caught from the pantomime of brutes?

Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived

Honor and fortune exist for him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

People only see what they are prepared to see. If you look for what is good and what you can be grateful for you will find it everywhere.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Genius is intellect constructive.