Whenever you see want or misery or degradation in this world about you, then be sure either industry has been wanting, or industry has been in error.
God will put up with a great many things in the human heart, but there is one thing that He will not put up with in it – a second place. He who offers God a second place, offers Him no place.
Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.
No day is without its innocent hope.
Our purity of taste is best tested by its universality, for if we can only admire this thing or that, we maybe use that our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature.
Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection.
True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.
I’ve seen the Rhine with younger wave, O’er every obstacle to rave. I see the Rhine in his native wild Is still a mighty mountain child.
You cannot have good architecture merely by asking people’s advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.
No divine terror will ever be found in the work of the man who wastes a colossal strength in elaborating toys; for the first lesson that terror is sent to teach us is, the value of the human soul, and the shortness of mortal time.
All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of “virtue” is that straightness of back.
There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.
It is not possible to find a landscape, which if painted precisely as it is, will not make an impressive picture. No one knows, till he has tried, what strange beauty and subtle composition is prepared to his hand by Nature.
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
If there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom of the visible creation, that principle is not liberty, but law.
Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained.
There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.
No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or argument; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin – victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts.