Great Throughts Treasury

"Wise men make Proverbs, but Fools repeat 'em."

"Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open."

"A wall between preserves love."

"A baited cat may grow as fierce as a lion."

"I believe in my very heart ? that all the very finest original pictures and topping things in nature have a certain quaintness by which they partially affect us ? not the quaintness of bungling ? the queer doing of a common thought ? but a curiousness in their beauty ? a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them while the sublime eagles and big birds of the French academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections ? one of the very deepest sayings I have met with in Lord Bacon seems to me to be ?There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.?"

"Rural poetry is the pleasure ground of those who live in cities."

"I hope to begin a new plan... not sitting down to local matter but walking and watching."

"When less than four years old I was standing with my nurse, Mary Ward, watching the shadows on the wall from branches of an elm behind which the moon had risen. I have never forgot those shadows and am often trying to paint them."

"It seems to me the charm of etching is the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows so that almost everything sparkles or suggest sparkles."