Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.