Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

Habit is stronger than reason.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.