Thomas Cole Quotes

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

Thomas Cole

#2. 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.

Thomas Cole

#3. 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.

Thomas Cole

#4. I never succeed in painting scenes, however beautiful, immediately upon returning from them. I must wait for a time to draw a veil over the common details ...

Thomas Cole

#5. Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness

Thomas Cole

#6. The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth a crystal-like ether, in the other a liquid gold.

Thomas Cole

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

Thomas Cole

#8. 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

Thomas Cole

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

Thomas Cole

#10. Nothing is invented and brought to perfection all at once.

Thomas Cole

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

Thomas Cole

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

Thomas Cole

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

Thomas Cole

#14. Amid those scenes of solitude ... the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

Thomas Cole

#15. It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths.

Thomas Cole