"Nearly all the powerful people of this age are unbelievers, the best of them in doubt and misery, the most in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can, what practical work lies at hand."

"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."

"All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness."

"Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time."

"It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists."

"Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back."

"No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple."

"Whereas it has long been known and declared that the poor have no right to the property of the rich, I wish it also to be known and declared that the rich have no right to the property of the poor."

"A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel."

"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."

"If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

"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."

"The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most."

"The child who desires education will be bettered by it; the child who dislikes it disgraced."

"Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions."

"The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it."

"It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and easy execution in the proper place, than to expand both indiscriminately."

"It is his restraint that is honorable to a person, not their liberty."

"Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition."

"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 that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it."

"And whether consciously or not, you must be in many a heart enthroned: queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter of womanhood."

"To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one."

"Cookery means, English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness."

"Absolute and entire ugliness is rare."

"Nothing is ever done beautifully which is done in rivalship: or nobly, which is done in pride."

"To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance."

"Whether for life or death, do your own work well."

"Sometimes gentle sometimes capricious sometimes awful never the same for two moments together almost human in its passions almost spiritual in its tenderness almost Divine in its infinity."

"No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change."

"Nothing can be beautiful which is not true."

"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."

"No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being."

"No one can do me any good by loving me I have more love than I need or could do any good with but people do me good by making me love them - which isn't easy."

"In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes."

"Modern science gives lectures on botany, to show there is no such thing as a flower; on humanity, to show there is no such thing as a man; and on theology, to show there is no such thing as a God. No such thing as a man, but only a mechanism, No such thing as a God, but only a series of forces."

"We are always in these days endeavoring to separate intellect and manual labor; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense."

"Occult Theft,--Theft which hides itself even from itself, and is legal, respectable, and cowardly,--corrupts the body and soul of man, to the last fibre of them. And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists."

"The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do."

"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. Whenyou pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you paytoo little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing youbought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. Thecommon law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting alot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is wellto add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you willhave enough to pay for something better."

"Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them."

"God alone can finish."

"When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package."

"You can only possess beauty through understanding it."

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."

"The first condition of education is being able to put someone to wholesome and meaningful work."

"The true knowledge is disciplined and tested knowledge,-not the first thought that comes, so the true passion is disciplined and tested passion,-not the first passion that comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined."

"The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it."

"When men are rightfully occupied then their amusement grows out of their work as the color petals out of a fruitful garden."