All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story.

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

We do not learn much from learned books, but from true, sincere, human books, from frank and honest biographies.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

Undoubtedly, in the most brilliant successes, the first rank is always sacrificed.

Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.

...how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!