"[Oxford] whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most."

"Eyes too expressive to be blue, / Too lovely to be grey."

"Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing."

"Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit."

"Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances."

"(Poetry) a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty"