The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

The great artist takes what he needs.

Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.

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

In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

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.

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.