We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.

Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.

Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.