Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.

Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.

Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor.

No one can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.

The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.

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.