Truth is only belived when someone has invented it well.

Life is an art not to be learned by observation.

What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

A good citizen must follow the movement of public affairs, so as to cast his vote intelligently, and know whether the party in power deserved his vote.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

Depression is rage spread thin.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.