Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.

If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

In life, man proposes, God disposes.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.