The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.