I do esteem individual liberty above everything. What is a nation for, but to secure the maximum liberty to every individual?

the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticising.

Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.

The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.

I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.