The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

You can only possess beauty through understanding it.

It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little.

You may assuredly find perfect peace, if you are resolved to do that which your Lord has plainly required--and content that He should indeed require no more of you--than to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with Him.

It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.

The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in 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.