Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

Art is a delayed echo.

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.