“Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.”

One may be humble out of pride.

My trade and art is to live.

There is a sort of gratification in doing good which makes us rejoice in ourselves.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.

There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge.

A wise man sees as much as he ought, not as much as he can.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

We can be knowledgable with other men’s knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.

Doctrine is the frame-work of life.

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.

O subtle love! a thousand wiles thou hast, by humble suit, by service, or by hire, to win a maiden’s hold,–a thing soon done, for nature framed all women to be won.

The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer’s Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.

I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it’s inside a frame.

Photographs are of course about their makers, and are to be read for what they disclose in that regard no less than for what they reveal of the world as their makers comprehend, invent, and describe it.