There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.

Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin

When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.