My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,- if I could have been invisible, all the better. . . to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, - happier if it needed no help of mine, - this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

Like other beautiful things in this world, its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.

I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie.

No amount of pay ever made a good soldier, a good teacher, a good artist, or a good workman.