Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been very little influenced by social systems, have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe. The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art.

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!

It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.