As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

The vulgar call good fortune that which really is produced by the calculations of genius.

In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.

When fear enters the heart of a man at hearing the names of candidates and the reading of laws that are proposed, then is the State safe, but when these things are heard without regard, as above or below us, then is the Commonwealth sick or dead.

The flowering of civilization is the finished man, the man of sense, of grace, of accomplishment, of social power--the gentleman.

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.