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.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.
Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.