He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity.
Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.
For the existing world is not a dream, and cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; neither is it a disease; but it is the ground on which you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born.
The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.
I look on Sculpture as history. I do not think the Apollo and the Jove impossible in flesh and blood. Every trait the artist recorded in stone, he had seen in life, and better than his copy.
It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world, was no man's work but came by wide social labor, whena thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse.
The escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and cheerful relation, these are the essentials.