A man is morally free when...he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity - George Santayana

At the prompting of some stray instinct or chance association, you will invent delightful or fearsome circumstances, identifying them, with the most shameful doubleness, with the real ones...you will burst into passionate eloquence, or pant in the direst predicament, all for the fun of it, or by virtue of a terrible inner compulsion; and this dream which is byplay, or play which is a waking dream, will exhibit your brooding soul, if not always to moral advantage or with much coherence, at least in its unsuspected ingenuities of invention. What brilliant images, what subtle emotions, what dramatic turns in the argument of a dream, and in the make-believe of children! You seem to dictate and compose your fiction deliberately, rejecting, foreseeing, feeling the oncoming revolution towards which circumstances must be addressed.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

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.