The school of life embodies a compulsory education that no man escapes.

The world is a multiplicity, a harvest-field, a battle-ground; and thence arises through human contact ways of numbering, or mathematics, ways of tillage, or agriculture, ways of fighting, or military tactics and strategy, and these are incorporated in individuals as habits of life.

A nation's poets are its true owners; and by the stroke of the pen they convey the title-deeds of its real possessions to strangers and aliens.

To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

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

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.

Aesthetic freedom is like free speech; it is, indeed, a form of free speech.