“What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?”

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

In art economy is always beauty.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.

I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.

The mathematical difficulties of the theory of rotation arise chiefly from the want of geometrical illustrations and sensible images, by which we might fix the results of analysis in our minds.

Flying and swimming is not a coincidence rather it is an illustration of the fact that a universal principle is involved.

In my opinion, he only may be truly said to live and enjoy his being who is engaged in some laudable pursuit, and acquires a name by some illustrious action, or useful art.

The glory of wealth and of beauty is fleeting and frail; virtue is illustrious and everlasting.

In any art, you don’t know in advance what you want to say – it’s revealed to you as you say it. That’s the difference between art and illustration.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Action illustrates desire.

I may do some good before I am dead–be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.