Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

The enormous influence of novelty--the way in which it quickens observations, sharpens sensations, and exalts sentiment--is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous.

No amount of pay ever made a good soldier, a good teacher, a good artist, or a good workman.

There is nothing that this age, from whatever standpoint we survey it, needs more, physically, intellectually, and morally, than thorough ventilation.

Production does not consist in things laboriously made, but in things serviceably consumable; and the question for the nation is not how much labour it employs, but how much life it produces.

Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are.