Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

Thrashing is not the most noticeably awful of disappointments. Not to have attempted is the genuine disappointment.

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy.

"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better.

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

You must find the ideas that have some promise in them... It is not enough to just have ideas.

A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.