We are all bundles of wild and warrantless convictions, especially about one another, and when one gets an accidental glimpse of someone else's candi… - Jacques Barzun

Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.

Scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometric mind. Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not "discourse about," nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship.

Like Nietzsche, he rails at romanticism, but it is evident that what they both mean by the word is the clichés of second-hand romance. Historic romanticism is in fact the ground-work of their philosophy.