When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

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

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.

I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.