If a person has no delicacy, he has you in his power.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

The most fluent talkers or most plausible reasoners are not always the justest thinkers.

The humblest painter is a true scholar; and the best of scholars the scholar of nature.

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.

It is not the passion of a mind struggling with misfortune, or the hopelessness of its desires, but of a mind preying on itself, and disgusted with, or indifferent to all other things.

We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering upon insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it.