The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

In truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

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

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

It is always hazardous to express what one has to say indirectly and allusively.