To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

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

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

It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religions, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.