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.

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

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.

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.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

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