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

“Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt.”

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

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

“The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.”

“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.”

“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.”