After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

The first wild-flower of the year is like land after sea.

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.

Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

The animation of the canvas is one of the hardest problems of painting.

I delight not in spreading any thing mysterious, for I consider it all lost time; but the things that all of us can see and know if we will.

And now, without having wearied my friends, I hope, with detailed scientific accounts, theories, or deductions, I will only say that I have endeavoured to tell just the story of the adventure itself.

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

What do you do if youre in a room with Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and John Sununu, and you have a gun with only two bullets? Shoot Sununu twice.

Everything in your life can change except ONE: your passion

I believed that I could still win no matter what the score was.

Even at summer time, I'm still jacket shopping. I've always found that if you find a really nice leather jacket you kind of just go with it because they're timeless.