There are faces so fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, that we can hardly find what the mere features really are. When the delicious beauty of lineament loses its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has appeared, that an interior and durable form has been disclosed.

He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming.

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.

The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.

Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.

Pay no heed to the average photographer's remarks upon "flat" and "weak" negatives. Probably he is flat, weak, stale, and unprofitable; your negative may be first-rate, and probably is if he does not approve of it.

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus or positive power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.