I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.

Wisdom is not found with those who dwell at their ease; rather nature, when she adds brain, adds difficulty.

Something is wanting to science until it has been humanised.

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Truth is the summit of being.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such success that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art.