“It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.”

“But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.”

“Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.”

“You have never been poor, and never known what ambition is.”

“The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.”

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”

“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.”