His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

Germination embraces in its complexity the explosion of a meteor and the breaking of the eggshell by the peck of the swallow's beak, and is equally responsible for the birth of an earthworm and the coming of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater vision? You choose. A patch of mould is a constellation of flowers. A nebula is an ant's nest of stars.

Aux siècles, aux révolutions qui dévastent du moins avec impartialité et grandeur, est venue s’adjoindre la nuée des architectes d’école, patentés, jurés et assermentés, dégradant avec le discernement et le choix du mauvais goût, substituant les chicorées de Louis XV aux dentelles gothiques pour la plus grande gloire du Parthénon. C’est le coup de pied de l’âne au lion mourant. C’est le vieux chêne qui se couronne, et qui, pour comble, est piqué, mordu, déchiqueté par les chenilles.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.

The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up.

In the domain of art there is no light without heat.

Beauty is as useful as the useful. More so, perhaps. (Le beau est aussi utile que l'utile. Plus peut-etre.)

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.