Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.

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.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.