“Love, the passion towards unity, is a direct agitation in the thing seeking unity, and differs, therefore, in its diagnosis as the thing differs.”

Defining love as a movement towards unity whose form depends on the lover · Unpublished notes, Beauty, Love, Order, Unity

• Love

“Anger is a passion of immature Love, excited by contact with what is not beauty.”

Interpreting anger as a stage in love's response to perceived disorder · Unpublished notes, Beauty, Love, Order, Unity

• Beauty
• Love

“Beauty is the harmony of rhythmic parts. Is not Beauty visible Love?”

Connecting beauty with rhythm, harmony and love made perceptible · Unpublished notes, Beauty, Love, Order, Unity

• Beauty
• Love
• Music

“Beauty is that which is loved to delight (by the Ideal Man).”

Defining beauty through the delight of an ideal perceiver · Unpublished notes, Beauty, Love, Order, Unity

• Beauty
• Love

“It is not enough, under given circumstances, to show that a benefit takes place. You require to show that it is the greatest possible under them.”

Demanding comparison with the best attainable good rather than mere improvement · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Hope
• Truth

“The Ideal Man must not only exist but express his existence.”

Making expression an essential part of fully realised humanity · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Art
• Truth

“All search for an ideal therefore, pre-necessitates the search for an ideal percipient—an ideal Man.”

Insisting that an ideal standard also requires an ideal judge · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Truth

“The testimony to an Ideal can be inferred by all of us from the fact that of things of the same kind we approve individuals more or less, and by admitting a better imply the possibility of a Best.”

Arguing from ordinary judgements of better and worse towards an ideal standard · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Beauty
• Truth

“Hope, in the soul, seems the unconscious witness of this principle of things.”

Making hope an inward sign of a larger tendency towards betterment · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Hope

“There is a tendency in all things—in the whole Cosmos and in its individual constituents—to struggle towards health.”

Expressing a hopeful vision of creation tending towards wholeness · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Hope
• Nature

“Philosophy is not a statement of things as they are, but a physiological biography of the human soul under the exciting causes of the Universe.”

Treating philosophy as a record of the mind responding to existence · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Truth

“In thinking of Truth it is to be borne in mind that we have nothing to do with things as they are, but with Things as they would appear to a perfect and perfectly healthy human Being.”

Locating human truth in the perceptions of an ideal human observer · Unpublished notes, Search for the Ideal

• Truth

“It is probable that human Memory, in all cases, follows, with more or less ability, the laws of Poetic Imagination—omitting and rearranging according to Unity.”

Linking memory with the selective and ordering work of imagination · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Memory
• Poetry

“Art, though it cannot hope to produce Truth, is an aspiration and effort towards Truth, and must therefore be essentially uncongenial with lying.”

Presenting art as an ethical movement towards truth rather than imitation alone · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Art
• Truth

“Art should be an instrument of this progress by always selecting the best phase of every individual, the best form of every type—i.e. the Ideal.”

Giving art a role in preserving and advancing ideal forms · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Art
• Beauty
• Hope

“The great progress of things takes place by the passage of the highest form of each thing into the thing above it.”

Imagining progress as the best in one form passing into a higher form · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Hope
• Time

“The harmony and consistency of every organism that is to live and act—whether political or otherwise—must not be that of Logic but of Art.”

Contrasting living organic order with rigid logical construction · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Art
• Truth

“A great part of the Poet's work is the making of equations.”

Casting poetic comparison as the discovery of equivalences · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Art
• Poetry

“All co-operative movements of many things that are obliged to conform to one time-beater, like the heart, must be rhythmic in order to avoid collision.”

Connecting rhythm with the ordered co-operation found in living systems · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Music
• Nature
• Poetry

“Contemplate a thing with all your powers—intellectual and moral—at once, and find a word or phrase that is the algebraic expression of that combination of forces and you speak Poetry.”

Describing poetry as concentrated expression of the whole perceiving mind · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Poetry
• Truth

“Few words are used in their central sense: in innumerable cases an accidental sense having become the accepted meaning. Poets restore the central sense.”

On poetry's power to recover the force hidden inside familiar words · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Poetry
• Truth

“A tree is a good illustration of the Law of a Poem, but the higher forms of creation are better.”

Comparing artistic unity with the organic unity of living nature · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Art
• Nature
• Poetry

“Whatever mode of thinking is necessarily confined to one or two points of the mental compass may be true but is not Religious.”

Defining religious thought by breadth and compatibility with the whole mind · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Faith
• Truth

“There is a poetical as well as a moral hypocrisy: and it is possible for the literary as well as the moral Pharisee to make void the living Law through dead tradition.”

Warning that inherited forms can become empty when detached from living truth · Lecture, Nature of Poetry, 1857

• Poetry
• Truth