Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

Man is an animal that cannot long be left in safety without occupation; the growth of his fallow nature is apt to run into weeds.

The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon.

Nothing is more binding than the friendship of companions-in-arms.

The ruin of most men dates from some idle moment.