Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

No false knight or lying priest ever prospered, I believe, in any age, but certainly not in the dark ones. Men prospered then, only in following openly-declared purposes , and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.

Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their restraint.

Geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven than in teaching navigation; surgery better in investigating organiation than in setting limbs; only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in science adds something to its practical applicabilities.