The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt.

Objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence that throughout the centuries something really happened among human beings.

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor anyone in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe.

I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty.

There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

No contact with savage Indian tribes has ever daunted me more than the morning I spent with an old lady swathed in woolies who compared herself to a rotten herring encased in a block of ice.