The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

....This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.

Great art... is the result of the labours of thousands of faithful craftsmen who know that they are doomed to remain for ever outside the gates of the Paradise of Perfection, but who nevertheless will give the very best there is in them because the work they do means more to them than anything else in this world.

Nature is rarely allowed to enter the sacred portals of civilized society.

In such a case the writer is apt to have recourse to epigrams. Somewhere in this world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed