Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.

Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.

Emulation embalms the dead; envy, the vampire, blasts the living.

Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.

All actions and attitudes of children are graceful because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment - divested of affectation and free from all pretense.

Indiscriminate pursuit of perfection infallibly leads to mediocrity.

Art among a religious race produces reliques [sic]; among a military one, trophies; among a commercial one, articles of trade.

The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality.

Ancient art was the tyrant of Egypt, the mistress of Greece and the servant of Rome.

Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked.

Growing up, I never heard my parents curse, never. The first time I ever said a curse word was with my sister Kim.

She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).

Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the struggle for equal rights.

For decades, we've been trying to cook up the building blocks of life, in the lab, and recreate the origins of it all, but the parts didn't seem to fit together, until now.

I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

I think the clearest manifestation for anyone who doubts that racism and classism exist in America, all one need do is take a real serious objective look at our criminal justice system.