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

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.

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.

We pass away out of the world as grasshoppers, and our life is astonishment and fear, and we are not worthy to obtain mercy.

Life is a lifetime opportunity to make the right choice to be great.

Being single is like liking a Phil Spector record.

I had this idea about terrible things happening to orphans, and I knew it was such a horrible idea that the idea of writing it down and then submitting it professionally was obviously absurd.

If you can't bear to have your face stepped on, don't try to climb the ladder of success.

I didn't want to lift weights and get all big; I just wanted to get cut.

The question I ask myself like almost everyday is 'Am I doing the most important thing I could be doing?'

To a reporter after Ray was pounded by Edmonton's Georges Laraque: What are you, the fight doctor now or something? You've never been in a fight in your life, so what are you talking about?

Time to go inward would you believe that I'm afraid to stare down the barrel of choices I have made.

Charity brings to life again those who are spiritually dead.