The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

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

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.