Thomas Cole Quotes

If I live to be old enough, I may sit down under some bush, the last left in the utilitarian world, and feel thankful that intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by.

Overall, rocks, wood and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its innermost depths.

To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.

None know how often the hand of God is seen in a wilderness but them that rove it for a man’s life.

How I have walked… day after day, and all alone, to see if there was not something among the old things which was new!

It is the sky that makes the earth so lovely at sunrise, and so splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth the crystal-like ether, in the other the liquid gold.

The ills of discrimination are still with us. We have to continue the tenacity and vigilance of the 1960s. Racial understanding is not something we find; it’s something we create.

Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nat, are unconscious of the harmony of creation.

If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry

How lovely are the portals of the night, when stars come out to watch the daylight die.

We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out is our own ignorance and folly.

. . .nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.