In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.

The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience.