To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful ... was a mark of the Greek spirit.

When we speak of beauty, we're speaking of something we're more or less indifferent to.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.

One form of religion perpetually gives way to another; if religion did not change it would be dead. ... Each time the new ideas appear they are seen at first as a deadly foe threatening to make religion perish from the earth; but in the end there is a deeper insight and a better life with ancient follies and prejudices gone.

Our word 'idiot' comes from the Greek name for the man who took no share in public matters.

Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.