capable.

An honorable man with limited ideas often sees through the rascality of
the most cunning jobber.

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must
act in spite of it, and then criticism will gradually yield to him.

The masses cannot dispense with men of ability, and such men are always
a burden to them.

If you lay duties upon people and give them no rights, you must pay them
well.

I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial.

Word and picture are correlatives which are continually in quest of each
other, as is sufficiently evident in the case of metaphors and similes.
So from all time what was said or sung inwardly to the ear had to be
presented equally to the eye. And so in childish days we see word and
picture in continual balance; in the book of the law and in the way of
salvation, in the Bible and in the spelling-book. When something was
spoken which could not be pictured, and something pictured which could
not be spoken, all went well; but mistakes were often made, and a word
was used instead of a picture; and thence arose those monsters of
symbolical mysticism, which are doubly an evil.

The importunity of young dilettanti must be borne with good-will; for as
they grow old they become the truest worshippers of Art and the Master.

People have to become really bad before they care for nothing but
mischief, and delight in it.

Clever people are the best encyclopaedia.

There are people who make no mistakes because they never wish to do
anything worth doing.

A man cannot live for every one; least of all for those with whom he
would not care to live.

I should like to be honest with you, without our falling out; but it
will not do. You act wrongly, and fall between two stools; you win no
adherents and lose your friends. What is to be the end of it?

If a clever man commits a folly, it is not a small one.

I went on troubling myself about general ideas until I learnt to
understand the particular achievements of the best men.

The errors of a man are what make him really lovable.

As in Rome there is, apart from the Romans, a population of statues, so
apart from this real world there is a world of illusion, almost more
potent, in which most men live.

Mankind is like the Red Sea; the staff has scarcely parted the waves
asunder before they flow together again. Thoughts come back; beliefs
persist; facts pass by never to return.

Of all peoples, the Gree