In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

There is only one thing certain and that is that nothing is certain

We can’t turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way.

Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.