Architecture is crystallized music.

There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.

Distance... is like futurity. A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

If a good person does you wrong, act as though you had not noticed it. If we practice and eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the wholeworld will be blind and toothless.

There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.

Assuredly there is no more lovely worship of God than that for which no image is required, but which springs up in our breast spontaneously when nature speaks to the soul, and the soul speaks to nature face to face.