Thomas Cole

“The sky is the soul of all scenery.”

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

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

“The most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.”

“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.”

“The sublime and beautiful are contradictory. That which is beautiful is soft and gentle; that which is sublime is austere and terrible.”

“I would not exchange my freedom for the fame of a Raphael.”

“It is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for... he is still in the midst of American scenery—it is his own land.”

“The wilderness is yet a part of the quietness of the earth, and it is in such places that the mind clarifies itself.”

“Art, in its true sense, is, in fact, the realization of the ideal.”

“There is in the human mind an inherent longing for something greater than itself.”