Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns...It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it...If you want to see the difference between [the garden's] contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our 'decency and common sense' show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured.

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.

Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not a negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them.

The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.