Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.

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

Music is our myth of the inner life.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".