It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.

Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality.

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.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.

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

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true.

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser, and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic.

Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.

Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts.

Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder.

To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.

He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the earth they, and they only.

Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfectionraise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.

In general, when the imagination is at all noble, it is irresistible, and therefore those who can at all resist it ought to resist it. Be a plain topographer if you possibly can; if Nature meant you to be anything else, she will force you to it; but never try to be a prophet.

No girl who is well bred, 'kind, and modest, is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want of manners, or of heart.

Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known.