Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves what shall be true for the future.

I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?

What right have you to take the word wealth, which originally meant well-being, and degrade and narrow it by confining it to certain sorts of material objects measured by money.

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.

So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.

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

Our large trading cities bear to me very nearly the aspect of monastic establishments in which the roar of the mill-wheel and the crane takes the place of other devotional music, and in which the worship of Mammon and Moloch is conducted with a tender reverence and an exact propriety; the merchant rising to his Mammon matins, with the self-denial of an anchorite, and expiating the frivolities into which he maybe beguiled in the course of the day by late attendance at Mammon vespers.