Remember that the most beautiful things in life are often the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance. - John Ruskin

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.

The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

The greatest thing a human being ever does in this world is to see something... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

We are to remember, in the first place, that the arrangement of colours and lines is an art analogous to the composition of music, and entirely independent of the representation of facts. Good colouring does not necessarily convey the image of anything but itself. It consists of certain proportions and arrangements of rays of light, but not in likeness to anything. A few touches of certain greys and purples laid by a master's hand on white paper will be good colouring; as more touches are added beside them, we may find out that they were intended to represent a dove's neck, and we may praise, as the drawing advances, the perfect imitation of the dove's neck. But the good colouring does not consist in that imitation, but in the abstract qualities and relations of the grey and purple.