Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.

I pay the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys that educate my son.

Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, Subjectiveness,--these are the threads on the loom of time, these are the lords of life.

But a compassion for that which is not and cannot be useful and lovely, is degrading and futile.

The best picture makes us say, I am a painter also.

The masters painted for joy, and knew not that virtue had gone out of them. They could not paint the like in cold blood. The masters of English lyric wrote their songs so. It was a fine efflorescence of fine powers.

Painting seems to be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness,to grace, the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten; so painting teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms.