We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

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

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

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.

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

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.

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