“Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”

“Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.”

“The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.”

“They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?”

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence. ”

“we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough”

“A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believingstrange things, and the stranger they are the easier they passwith him; but never regards those that are plain andfeasible, for every man can believe such.”