Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.

Poet and sculptor, do the work, / Nor let the modish painter shirk