Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations