A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

Taste depends upon those finer emotions which make the organization of the soul.

In portraits, the grace and, we may add, the likeness consists more in taking the general air than in observing the exact similitude of every feature.

Every art, like our own, has in its composition fluctuating as well as fixed principles. It is an attentive inquiry into their difference that will enable us to determine how far we are influenced by custom and habit, and what is fixed in the nature of things.

The value and rank of every art is in proportion to the mental labor employed in it, or the mental pleasure in producing it.

Nothing is denied to well-directed labor.

Reform is a work of time; a national taste, however wrong it may be, cannot be totally changed at once.