Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.

Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge, or a vigour of spring, as well as an infinite variety of colour that no artefact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival...each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday.