Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness.

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.

The safest kind of praise is to foretell that another will become great in some particular way. It has the greatest show of magnanimity and the least of it in reality.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death.