An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes.
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
It is a great bond to dislike the same things.
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.