To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.

The romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others (the competitive market place) and from nature, which had been reduced down to a machine through technology. The antidote to such division is unity and wholeness, which means feeling at home again in the world.

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

There is no comfortable middle path where we get to provide a rational justification for our basic moral, religious and common sense beliefs.

Liberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary.

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.