It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.

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

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

If you spell a word wrong you have some temptation to think it wrong.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.