The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

The man in the street does not know a star in the sky.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

A great man will find a great subject, or which is the same thing, make any subject great.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.