All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.

A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.

On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.