The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.

The measure of any great civilization is its cities and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.

What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.