The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

Sexual activity is driven by the same aims and motives as reading poetry or listening to music: to escape the limitations imposed by the need for particularity in the consciousness.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

Faculty X is a sense of reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

I have a strong antipathy to everything connected with gardens, gardening and gardeners. . . . Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. . . . Man was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world. Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.