Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent.

Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.

To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.

The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser...and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.