I prefer being honest to being 'honest to God.'

We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.

If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.

I don't want him to live forever, and I know that he's not going to live forever whether I want him to or not.

Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way (there is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.