Shakespeare wrote better poetry for not knowing too much; Milton, I think, knew too much finally for the good of his poetry.

The English never abolish anything. They put it in cold storage.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

Ninety percent of our lives is governed by emotion. Our brains merely register and act upon what is telegraphed to them by our bodily experience. Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without clothes, but we would be in a poor way if we had only clothes without bodies.

With the sense of sight, the idea communicates the emotion, whereas, with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful.

A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.

The ideas of Freud were popularized by people who only imperfectly understood them, who were incapable of the great effort required to grasp them in their relationship to larger truths, and who therefore assigned to them a prominence out of all proportion to their true importance.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.