No good book or good thing of any kind shows it best face at first. No the most common quality of in a true work of art that has excellence and depth, is that at first sight it produces a certain disappointment.

Whose school-hours are all the days and nights of our existence.

The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.

Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom.

To the wisest man, wide as is his vision. Nature remains of quite infinite depth, of quite infinite expansion and all experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and measured square miles.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding. On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.