I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.

One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on.

The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into lustre.

The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery