It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.

What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.

The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.

Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.

Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.