Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
All I have is a voice.
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
To make one, there must be two.
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.