When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.

There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.

You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable-nay, letter by letter... you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," undeducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy- you are for evermore in some measure an educated person.