Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.
Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them.
More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read.
Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian.
Music is the perfect type of art.
If a woman wants to hold a man she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.
It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.
Art, like Nature, has her monsters.
Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost.
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.
It was only in the theatre that I lived.
We live, I regret to say, in an age of Big Data hype.
The great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the mind.
The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
Always be a little unexpected.
Authority is quite degrading.
Don’t feed the trolls; nothing fuels them so much.
Walt Whitman and Emerson are the poets who have given the world more than anyone else. Perhaps Whitman is not so widely read in England, but England never appreciates a poet until he is dead.