There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.