The traveller’s-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.
When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.
The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
People are much too solemn about things – I’m all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
Since Mozart’s day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it.
Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?