The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

English history is aristocracy with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let him come in.

Human society is made up of partialities. Each citizen has an interest and a view of his own, which, if followed out to the extreme, would leave no room for any other citizen.

Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior.

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.

Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.

The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning.