"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism."

“What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?”

“Mr. Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural — but little developed — aptitude for seriousness.”

“I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me.”

“so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.”

“When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.”

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”