Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

What you intuitively desire, that is possible to you.

So long as you don't feel life's paltry and a miserable business, the rest doesn't matter, happiness or unhappiness.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towards the other soul, not away from it. . . . To love you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing which endures.

It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.

There is a sixth sense, the natural religious sense, the sense of wonder.

I don't believe any more in democracy. But I can't believe in the old sort of aristocracy, either, nor can I wish it back, splendid as it was. What I believe in is the old Homeric aristocracy, when the grandeur was inside a man, and he lived in a simple wooden house.