Do not mistake a crowd of big wage earners for the leisure class.

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.