"Said a man to me recently. “I would give twenty years of my life to be able to write an immortal hymn.” With such an ambition a man cannot write a hymn. He wants to pose. He is thinking of himself, of his own glory. Before a man can write an immortal hymn, or create any immortal work he must give, not twenty years of his life to ambition, but to do anything great, he must sing, paint, write, ten thousand bitter experiences, ten thousand failures, ten thousand conquests, ten thousand joys. He must know Gethsemane; he must work with blood and tears.
Men of great genius are such because of their spontaneous simplicity… “Retaining their intellect and moral powers, and returning to simplicity, a man becomes great. He forfeits nothing real. Only shames are cast aside, revealing the standard gold of character. Where there is sincerity there will always be simplicity - a simplicity of the kind we see in nature, the beautiful simplicity of truth.”