An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.

Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.

We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.