A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

We live in an age of science and of abundance. The care and reverence for books as such, proper to an age when no book was duplicated until someone took the pains to copy it out by hand, is obviously no longer suited to ’the needs of society’, or to the conservation of learning. The weeder is supremely needed if the Garden of the Muses is to persist as a garden.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.