“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

Moonlight is sculpture.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

I consider myself an artist, which is, like, the most played term, but I believe it.

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of the mind for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Inspire me with love for my art and for thy creatures. In the sufferer let me see only the human being.

An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

It is easier for women to succeed in business, the arts, and politics in America than in Europe.

What one does in one’s art, that is the breath of one’s being. What one does in one’s life, that is a bagatelle for the outsiders to fuss about.