The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time.

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

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.

I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.

The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old.