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

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

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.

We’re only instruments of love, flowing through heaps of pain hoping one day we’d hatch a passion of our own.

If you want something done, you'll have to dream it yourself.

It wouldn't do to go mixing up the present and the past, and cutting bits out of one to fit into the other.

when you do more than you learn, you leave a distinctive notable footprints on earth

Comedy is a blood sport. It flays the truth and spurts twisted logic. In America, people become comics because we don't have bullfighting.

People need things. I don't live a monk's existence, I'm a consumer, but I try to do it to the level that doesn't feel like there's an overabundance of something.

Our state cannot be severed, we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.

The trouble with many plans is that they are based on the way things are now. To be successful, your personal plan must focus on what you want, not what you have.

I don't believe in happy families.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.