There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
Men don’t and can’t live by exchanging articles, but by producing them. They don’t live by trade, but by work. Give up that foolish and vain title of Trades Unions; and take that of laborers Unions.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
It is far better to give work that is above a person, than to educate the person to be above their work.
Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.
Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.
An unimaginative person can neither be reverent nor kind.
As long as there are cold and nakedness in the land around you, so long can there be no question at all but that splendor of dress is a crime.
Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them – in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.
It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them.
The distinctive character of a child is to always live in the tangible present.
The great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in very deed for this – that we manufacture everything there except men.
The last act crowns the play.
It does not matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have cut thongs for it out of your own souls.
No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.
A splendour of miscellaneous spirits.
You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.
The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.