The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

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

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.

When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera... and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow's chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.

If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law.

I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only.