All perishable is but an allegory.
America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.
An actor should take lessons from a painter and a sculptor.
The older we grow, the greater become the ordeals.
Old age is never honored among us, but only indulged, as childhood is; and old men lose one of the most precious rights of man, – that of being judged by their peers.
Were not the eye made to receive the rays of the sun, it could not behold the sun; if the peculiar power of God lay not in us, how could the godlike charm us?
Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.
Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion, – on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion.
In art, to express the infinite one should suggest infinitely more than is expressed.
Many young painters would never have taken their pencils in hand if they could have felt, known, and understood, early enough, what really produced a master like Raphael.
The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people is satisfied with ornament.
The misfortune in the state is, that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern; and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account.
We learn to treasure what is above this earth; we long for revelation, which nowhere burns more purely and more beautifully than in the New Testament.
Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.
It is belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found capital safely invested and richly productive of interest, although I have sometimes made but a bad use of it.
Dispel not, the happy delusions of children.
In praising or loving a child, we love and praise not that which is, but that which we hope for.
We should treat children as God does us, who makes us happiest when He leaves us under the influence of innocent delusions.
What in us the women leave uncultivated, children cultivate when we retain them near us.
A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.