It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.

Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.

So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.

When we build ... let it not be for present delights nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think ... that a time is to come when these stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labor, and the wrought substance of them, See! This our fathers did for us!

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)