It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.