Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonAs the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn, — its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveliness is the fairest.
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonAfter all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.
Thomas Wentworth HigginsonAll... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson