Taste is only to be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent. I therefore show you only the best works; and when you are grounded in these, you will have a standard for the rest, which you will know how to value, without overrating them.

Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.

Time is a strange thing. It is a whimsical tyrant, which in every century has a different face for all that one says and does.

Care is taken that trees do not grow into the sky.