One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.
Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.
It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.
The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.
Man's only true happiness is to live in hope of something to be won by him. Reverence something to be worshipped by him, and love something to be cherished by him, forever.
A great thing can only be done by a great person; and they do it without effort.
We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it.
No lying knight or lying priest ever prospered in any age, but especially not in the dark ones. Men prospered then only in following an openly declared purpose, and preaching candidly beloved and trusted creeds.
Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty.
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
No human being however great or powerful was ever so free as a fish.
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.
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
The sky is the part of creation in which nature has done for the sake of pleasing man.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.
Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
We were not sent into this world to do anything into which we can not put our heart.
Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
There are no such things as Flowers there are only gladdened Leaves.
The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work.
What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do.
No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.
Let every dawn be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.
A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.
I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is simply this; was it done with enjoyment, was the carver happy while he was about it?
Civilization is the making of civil persons.
What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
The imagination is never governed, it is always the ruling and divine power.
Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.
The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy.
Natural abilities can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural abilities.
It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us.
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.
Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.
A book worth reading is worth buying.
He that would be angry and sin not, must not be angry with anything but sin.
