How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

Our respect for the dead, when they are just dead, is something wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow, which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the epitaph.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

Commerce is the agency by which the power of choice is obtained.

Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.

The repose necessary to all beauty is repose, not of inanition, nor of luxury, nor of irresolution, but the repose of magnificent energy and being; in action, the calmness of trust and determination; in rest, the consciousness of duty accomplished and of victory won; and this repose and this felicity can take place as well in the midst of trial and tempest, as beside the waters of comfort.

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.