The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

Character is that which can do without success.

In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is thereforeuseful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our notions of fit and fair-all these we never made; we found them ready-made; we but quote from them. What would remain to me if this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius? Every one of my writings has been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand things; wise and foolish have brought me, without suspecting it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and experience. My work is an aggregation of beings taken from the whole of nature. It bears the name of Goethe.

If the vast and the spiritual are omitted, so are the practical and the moral.

Women see better than men. Men see lazily, if they do not expect to act. Women see quite without any wish to act.

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes.