When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture.

It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.

The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.

Painting is with me but another word for feeling.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

There has never been a boy painter, nor can there be. The art requires a long apprenticeship, being mechanical, as well as intellectual.

We see nothing till we truly understand it.