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.

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

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

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

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.

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

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