The object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy them

There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.

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.

Whatever merit there is in anything that I have written is simply due to the fact that when I was a child my mother daily read me a part of the Bible and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.