Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.

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.

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

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.