“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
“Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.”
“It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.”
“Great people are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.”
“Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.”
“The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.”
“There is no beautifier of complexion or form of behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.”
“I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them.”
“Love and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.”
“The measure of a great leader, is their success in bringing everyone around to their opinion twenty years later.”
“It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay.”
“The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.”
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.”
“Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.”
“A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.”
“Those who cannot tell what they desire or expect, still sigh and struggle with indefinite thoughts and vast wishes.”
“The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.”
“Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.”
“We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.”
“Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?”
“Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.”
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
“There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom.”
“There is this to be said in favor of drinking, that it takes the drunkard first out of society, then out of the world.”
“In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
“There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.”
“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.”
“Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.”
“Wise men are not wise at all hours, and will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from their reason.”
“We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.”