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.

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.

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.

Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.

Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering and more sagacious.

That which is required in order to the attainment of accurate conclusions respecting the essence of the Beautiful is nothing morethan earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to our impressions of it.

I tell you (dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well) a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that were ever dipped in acid... Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That and no more. (1865)