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

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.

All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.

That the mere matter of a poem, for instance--its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture--the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape--should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.

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.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.