Realists do small things, romantics great ones. A man must be a realist to be manager of a tin-tackfactory. He must be a romantic to be manager of the world.

It needs a realist to find reality; it needs a romantic to create it. Napoleon is only a poet, Cromwell an enthusiast, Caesar a rhetorician.

The distance between Henry Ford and John Milton is always longer on the return train.

Achievement is death, because it is the end. The romantics are self-survivals, perpetual incarnations of their own selves (...)

Civilisation is Graeco-Roman and is therefore in the line of development of the Southern nations. It is still Mediterranean to some extent, though it passed, with Portugal, the Pillars of Hercules and added the world to Rome.

Travels by sea like those of Drake, Frobisher, Cook and (as the Patent Office says) “the like” are so insignificant in the sociology of discovery that (it were better patriotism for an Englishman never to mention them at all) it were a wiser patriotism with Englishmen to omit all reference to them except as national incidents of a foreign impulse. Politics and not navigation is the English contribution to the substance of civilisation. England found the sea only after it was told where it was.

Os realistas fazem as pequenas coisas, e os românticos as grandes. Para se ser gerente de uma fábrica de tachas, tem de se ser realista. Para se gerir o mundo, tem de se ser romântico.

Só um realista pode encontrar a realidade; só um romântico a pode criar. Napoleão é apenas poeta, Cromwell um entusiasta, César um retórico.

A distância entre Henry Ford e John Milton é sempre maior no combóio de regresso.

A realização é a morte, por ser o fim. Os românticos são auto-sobrevivências, incarnações perpétuas de si próprios (...).

A civilização é greco-romana, inserindo-se, portanto, na linha de evolução das nações meridionais. É ainda mediterrânea em certa medida, embora com Portugal passasse para além das Colunas de Hércules e somasse o mundo a Roma.