The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

... except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing.

I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.