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

Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures

And now come with me, for I have kept you too long from your gondola: come with me, on an autumnal morning, to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal, with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us, — it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy.

In painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter your manner.