To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.