War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

Analysis kills spontaneity.

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.