Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.
Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge.
In great countries, children are always trying to remain children, and the parents want to make them into adults. In vile countries, the children are always wanting to be adults and the parents want to keep them children.
Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust and I will paint you a luminous picture if you give me time to gradate my mud and subdue my dust.
When God shuts a door, He opens a window.
What is poetry? The suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.
No individual rain drop ever considers itself responsible for the flood.
An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.
Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.
To give alms is nothing unless you give thought also.
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you.
Human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now Men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or were ever slugs, being practically no matter.
Absolute and entire ugliness is rare.
To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.
God never imposes a duty without giving time to do it.
God alone can finish.
The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
Many thoughts are so dependent upon the language in which they are clothed that they would lose half their beauty if otherwise expressed.