Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.

If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.

A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.

This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.