Hence I must refuse." Rufus Choate would plead before a shoemaker justice of the peace in a petty case with all the fervor and careful attention to detail with which he addressed the United States Supreme Court.
"Whatever is right to do," said an eminent writer, "should be done with our best care, strength, and faithfulness of purpose; we have no scales by which we can weigh our faithfulness to duties, or determine their relative importance in God's eyes.

That which seems a trifle to us may be the secret spring which shall move the issues of life and death." "There goes a man that has been in hell," the Florentines would say when Dante passed, so realistic seemed to them his description of the nether world.
"There is only one real failure in life possible," said Canon Farrar; "and that is, not to be true to the best one knows." "It is quite astonishing," Grove said of Beethoven, "to find the length of time during which some of the best known instrumental melodies remained in his thoughts till they were finally used, or the crude, vague, commonplace shape in which they were first written down.

The more they are elaborated, the more fresh and spontaneous they become." Leonardo da Vinci would walk across Milan to change a single tint or the slightest detail in his famous picture of the Last Supper.

"Every line was then written twice over by Pope," said his publisher Dodsley, of manuscript brought to be copied.

Gibbon wrote his memoir nine times, and the first chapters of his history eighteen times.