All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.

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

Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

All color is no color.

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.

A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.