To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.

At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them.

In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

Though nature is constantly beautiful, she does not exhibit her highest powers of beauty constantly, for then they would satiate us and pall upon our senses. It is necessary to their appreciation that they should be rarely shown. Her finest touches are things which must be watched for; her most perfect passages of beauty are the most evanescent.

See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it.

Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.

You will never love art well until you love what she mirrors better.