“Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.”

“There are books . . . which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.”

“Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”

“People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”

“Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.”

“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”