“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

“The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful.”

“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

“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.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”