No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.

It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.

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.

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.