Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.

We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!

We may, without offending any laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

One of the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease of thinking.

Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.

We are only advancing in life, whose hearts are getting softer, our blood warmer, our brains quicker, and our spirits entering into living peace.

An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.