Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people, mostly poor.

If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it.

Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself -my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness -darkness -bitter mockery of herself -is the most desolating.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

However good you may be you have faults; however dull you may be you can find out what some of them are, and however slight they may be you had better make some - not too painful, but patient efforts to get rid of them.

In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith, in later times they use the objects of faith to show their powers of painting.

A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.