Mankind is the grandest and surest artist of all, and history as it clarifies is, in pure fact, an artistic process, a creation in its fullness of the beautiful soul.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

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

Seasonal changes, as it were, take place in history, when there is practically an almost universal death, a falling of the foliage of the tree of life. Such were the intervals between the ancient and mediaeval time, the mediaeval and the modern.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

A writer is justly called 'universal' when he is understood within the limits of his civilization, though that be bounded by a country or an age.

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.