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.

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.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colors, these aesthetically moving forms, I call ‘Significant Form’; and ‘Significant Form’ is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

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

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