We love it because it is self dependent, self derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.

Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.

Conversation in society is found to be on a platform so low as to exclude science, the saint, and the poet.

The most active lives have so much routine as to preclude progress almost equally with the most inactive.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, - under all these screens I have diffuculty to detect the precise man you are: and of course so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect I anticipate your argument.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

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.