In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry.

The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

The time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction.

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.

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.