When It's Darkest, Men See the Stars.

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can offer with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation, but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.

The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood?

We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.