Genius is that in which the soul of a race bums at its brightest, revealing and preserving its vision; works of art are great and significant in proportion to the clarity and fulness with which they incarnate this vision.
Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-field, a battle-ground; and thence arises through human contact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of tillage, or agriculture, ways of fighting, or military tactics and strategy, and these are incorporated in individuals as habits of life.
Who of English speech, bred to the traditions of his race, does not recognize Hamlet in his ‘inky cloak’ at a glance? Not to know him would argue one’s self untaught in the chief glories of his language.
Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.
Agitation is that part of our intellectual life where vitality results; there ideas are born, breed and bring forth.
The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes.
Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify – through things.
The sense that someone else cares always helps because it is the sense of love.
Education has really only one basic factor: one must want it.
I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.
My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.
A writer is justly called ‘universal’ when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.
If you can’t have faith in what is held up to you for faith, you must find things to believe in yourself, for a life without faith in something is too narrow a space to live.
Always begin anew with the day, just as nature does. It is one of the sensible things that nature does.
The sweetest roamer is a boy’s young heart.
We foresee no limit to scientific advancement in the future, and in scientific truth there is nothing dead; science is always a living and growing body of knowledge; but art on the contrary has many times run its course to an end, and exhausted its vital power.
The willingness to take risks is our grasp of faith.
What faith in man must in our new world beat, Thinking how once he saw before his face The west and all the host of stars retreat Into the silent infinite of space!
What holy cities are to nomadic tribes – a symbol of race and a bond of union – great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.