A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.

Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.

We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.

As things are now going the peace we make, what peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace in brief.without moral purpose or human interest.