I admit that the best things are the commonest, but the highest types and the best combinations of them are the rarest.

There is more love in the world than anything else, for instance; but the best love and the individual in whom love is supreme are the rarest of all things.
That for which humanity has the strongest claim upon its workmen, is the representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the present day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of which men see the most--that type of things which could never have been but that it might pass.

The demand marks the commonness, narrowness, low-levelled satisfaction of the age.

It loves its own--not that which might be, and ought to be its own--not its better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the sake of whose approach it exists.

I do not think that the age is worse in this respect than those which have preceded it, but that vulgarity, and a certain vile contentment swelling to self-admiration, have become more vocal than hitherto; just as unbelief, which I think in reality less prevailing than in former ages, has become largely more articulate, and thereby more loud and peremptory.