SaturdayOct 24, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil; Buy it by compromise with evil.
Consider what heavy responsibility lies upon you in your youth, to determine, among realities, by what you will be delighted, and, among imaginations, by whose you will be led.
Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.
The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it!
Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery.
They are the weakest-minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love change.
There is no wealth but life.
The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances And demonstrations for impressions.
I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for instance.
Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely Being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.
Life is a magic vase filled to the brim; so made that you cannot dip into it nor draw from it; but it overflows into the hand that drops treasures into it - drop in malice and it overflows hate; drop in charity and it overflows lo
It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately.
In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
Cheerfulness is as natural to the heart of a man in strong health as color to his cheek; and wherever there is habitual gloom there must be either bad air, unwholesome food, improperly severe labor, or erring habits of life.
Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your vision is the promise of what you shall at last unveil.
The entire object of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things not merely industrious, but to love industry not merely learned, but to love knowledge not merely pure, but to love purity not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.
Do not think of your faults, still less of others' faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
However good you may be you have faults; however dull you may be you can find out what some of them are, and however slight they may be you had better make some not too painful, but patient efforts to get rid of them.
You will find it less easy to uproot faults than to choke them by gaining virtues. Do not think of your faults, still less of other's faults. In every person who comes near you look for what is good and strong; honor that; try to imitate it, and your faults will drop off like dead leaves when their time comes.
I hold it for indisputable, that the first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But in order to the effecting this the Government must have an authority over the people of which we now do not so much as dream.
No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.
Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things.
The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race.
Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
Without the perfect sympathy with the animals around them, no gentleman's education, no Christian education, could be of any possible use.
Of all the things you wear, your expression is the most important.
I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done.
Life without industry is guilt. Industry without Art is Brutality.
To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education.
Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it. Your honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the night.
I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. Really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, incredibly merciful.
It is eminently a weariable faculty, eminently delicate, and incapable of bearing fatigue; so that if we give it too many objects at a time to employ itself upon, or very grand ones for a long time together, it fails under the effort, becomes jaded, exactly as the limbs do by bodily fatigue, and incapable of answering any farther appeal till it has had rest.
Though you may have known clever men who were indolent, you never knew a great man who was so; and when I hear a young man spoken of as giving promise of great genius, the first question I ask about him always is, Does he work?
It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.
Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.
There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.
All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.
Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some intellectual intention.
They are good furniture pictures, unworthy of praise, and undeserving of blame.
Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself my disgust at her barbarity clumsiness darkness bitter mockery of herself is the most desolating.
Do not think it wasted time to submit yourself to any influence that will bring upon you any noble feeling.
There are many religions, but there is only one morality.
No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
The question is not what man can scorn, or disparage, or find fault with, but what he can love, and value, and appreciate.
Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.
There is hardly anything in the world that some man can't make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.
Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of an intelligent effort.
To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered.
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
The highest reward for a mans toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us, becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be far wrong in either who loves trees enough, and everyone is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way.
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.
You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and most delicate ways, improve yourself.
The bitterness of poor quality Lingers long after The sweetness of low price is forgotten.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think.
Taste is the only morality.... Tell me what you like and Ill tell you what you are.
No one can ask honestly or hopefully to be delivered from temptation unless he has himself honestly and firmly determined to do the best he can to keep out of it.
To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.
To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
The best thing in life aren't things.
The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbours pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you.
There is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it; They must not do too much of it; And they must have a sense of success in it.
This is the true nature of home it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.
On the whole, it is patience which makes the final difference between those who succeed or fail in all things. All the greatest people have it in an infinite degree, and among the less, the patient weak ones always conquer the impatient strong.
It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
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