Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.

I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone.

The rain comes when the wind calls.

Words are finite expressions of the infinite mind.

Our high respect for a well-read man is praise enough for literature. - Ralph Waldo Emerson