If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

That text is known to them that have the patience to read it, possibly one one-hundredth of one percent of the denizens. They forget it, all save a few Western states. I think somebody in Dakota once read it. The Constitution.

What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.

Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.