What we have to do is to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

Has nature connected itself together by no bond, allowed itself to be thus crippled, and split into the divine and human elements? Well! there are certain divine powers of a middle nature, through whom our aspirations are conveyed to the gods, and theirs to us. A celestial ladder, a ladder from heaven to earth.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.