Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook.

No architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

The noble grotesque involves the true appreciation of beauty.

What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.

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.

When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.

Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God's throne infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontent with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.