I hate anything that occupies more space than it is worth... I hate to see a parcel of big words without anything in them.

Grace has been defined as the outward expression of the inward harmony of the soul.

There is nothing so remote from vanity as true genius. It is almost as natural for those who are endowed with the highest powers of the human mind to produce the miracles of art, as for other men to breathe or move. Correggio, who is said to have produced some of his divinest works almost without having seen a picture, probably did not know that he had done anything extraordinary.

As we are poetical in our natures, so we delight in fable.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself; the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave.

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.