Quote collection
606 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools."
"That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know."
"It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible which my mother taught me, that which cost me the most to learn, and which was to my childish mind the most repulsive - Psalm 119 - has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the Law of God."
"Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth."
"Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained."
"The artist's business is to feel, although he may think a little sometimes... when he has nothing better to do."
"Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime."
"The great cry that rises from our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages."
"I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage."
"In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner."
"The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past."
"The anger of a person who is strong, can always bide its time."
"That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far reaching ruin"
"Better a child should be ignorant of a thousand truths than have consecrated in its heart a single lie."
"You may sell your work, but not your soul."
"The eye is continually influenced by what it cannot detect; nay, it is not going too far, to say that it is most influenced by what it detects least. Let the painter define, if he can, the variations of lines on which depend the change of expression in the human countenance."
"See that your children be taught, not only the labors of the earth, but the loveliness of it."
"In order that a man may be happy, it is necessary that he should not only be capable of his work, but a good judge of his work."
"Men have commonly more pleasure in the criticism which hurts than in that which is innocuous, and are more tolerant of the severity which breaks hearts and ruins fortunes than of that which falls impotently on the grave."