1. “We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.”
2. “It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.”
3. “I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic”
4. “The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.”
5. “All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.”
6. “It would follow that ‘significant form’ was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.”
7. “Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.”
8. “I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.”
9. “Comfort came in with the middle classes.”
10. “Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy.”
11. “There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.”
12. “Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.”
13. “The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be personal experience of a peculiar object emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.”
14. “Detail is the heart of realism and the fatty degeneration of art.”
15. “The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must brig with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.”
