The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.

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.

One evening, when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily ... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said "Let him touch it." So I touched it - and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty.

There is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.

Disorder in a drawing-room is vulgar; in an antiquary's study, not; the black battle-stain on a soldier's face is not vulgar, but the dirty face of a housemaid is.