The Secret Glory

I had refined and symbolised and made her into a sign of joy, and now before me she shone disarrayed—not a symbol, but a woman, in the new intelligence that had come to me, and I longed for her. I had just enough strength and no more."

but even then with but little knowledge I was rapt at the thought of this marvellous knight-errantry, of this Christianity which was not a moral code, with some sort of metaphorical Heaven held out as a reward for its due observance, but a great mystical adventure into the unknown sanctity.

that is impiety, since it accuses the Zeitgest, who is certainly the only god that ever existed,

The imbeciles are not content to calumniate, to persecute, to make wretched the artist in his lifetime. They follow him with their praise to the grave—the grave that they have digged! Praise of the populace! Praise of a race of pigs! For, you see, while they are insulting the dead with their compliments they are at the same time insulting the livin

Incense, vestments, candles, all ceremonies, processions, rites—all these things are miserably inadequate; but they do not abound in the horrible pitfalls, misapprehensions, errors which are inseparable from speech of men used as an expression of the Church. In a savage dance there may be a vast deal more of the truth than in many of the hymns in o

Facts are known to be stubborn things, but if their very existence is denied they become ferocious and terrible things.

It is probable, I think, that there is a point where the ascetic principle and the aesthetic become one and the same.

Inexorable in its sad reiterations, in its remorseless development, that music wailed and grew in its lamentation in my own heart; heavy it was, and without hope; heavy as those still, leaden clouds that hung motionless in heaven. No relief came to this sorrowing melody—rather a sharper note of anguish; and then for a moment, as if to embitter bitt

confusion—but Don Quixote failed and fell, while Sancho Panza lived a fat, prosperous peasant.