It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away.

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.