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.

Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

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.