Cheerfulness, in most cheerful people, is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline. - Edwin Percy Whipple

The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.

Talent is full of thoughts; Genius, of thought: one has definite acquisitions; the other, indefinite power.

Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; it imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all. It is another name for the perfection of human nature, for Genius is not a fact but an ideal. It is nothing less than the possession of all the powers and impulses of humanity, in their greatest possible strength and most harmonious combination; and the genius of any particular man is great in proportion as he approaches this ideal of universal genius.