Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Our prejudices are our robbers, they rob us valuable things in life. People only see what they are prepared to see.

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.

The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture...food for our mind, as well as our body.

The genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design,--he will presently undervalue the actual object.

Add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.