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

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

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

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

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

. . . 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.