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

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.

Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

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