All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.

The continual pursuit of meanings-wider, clearer, more negotiable, more articulate meanings- is philosophy.

... the image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art -- plastic, musical, poetic, balletic -- serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

What is artistically good is whatever articulates and presents feeling to our understanding.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there.

Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune - what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate.