Words, like lenses, darken whatever they do not help us see.
Buffon says that genius is but the aptitude for being patient. The aptitude for a long-continued and unwearying effort of attention is indeed, the genius of observation; but there is another genius, that of invention, which is aptitude for a quick, prompt, and ever-active energy of penetration.
Buffon’s is a good working definition, to say the least—for genius of any sort.
The end of a production should always call to mind its beginning.
This may be compared to the law in musical composition requiring that a piece end in the key in which it began.
Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.
“Artistic,” instead of “literary,” Joubert might have widened his “thought” by saying.
When there is born in a nation a man capable of producing a great thought, another is born there capable of understanding it and of admiring it.
That which astonishes, astonishes once; but that which is admirable is more and more admired.