Every true artist feels that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.

The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Modern man is educated to understand foreign languages and misunderstand foreigners.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.