C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Hillard
A vacant mind invites dangerous inmates, as a deserted mansion tempts wandering outcasts to enter and take up their abode in its desolate apartments.
Artists will sometimes speak of Rome with disparagement or indifference while it is before them; but no artist ever lived in Rome and then left it, without sighing to return.
Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon.
Man is an animal that cannot long be left in safety without occupation; the growth of his fallow nature is apt to run into weeds.
Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it.
Occupation is the armor of the soul.
Sunsets in themselves are generally superior to sunrises; but with the sunset we appreciate images drawn from departed peace and faded glory.
The force of selfishness is as inevitable and as calculable as the force of gravitation.
The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.
The ruin of most men dates from some idle moment.
The shadow of human life is traced upon a golden ground of immortal hope.
There are pictures by Titian so steeped in golden splendors, that they look as if they would light up a dark room like a solar lamp.
Wealth brings noble opportunities, and competence is a proper object of pursuit; but wealth, and even competence, may be bought at too high a price. Wealth itself has no moral attribute. It is not money, but the love of money, which is the root of all evil. It is the relation between wealth and the mind and the character of its possessor which is the essential thing.