The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

History is only a value of relation.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.