Sentir mon Cœur is a privilege only granted to the exceptional man - the one who has the ability to find words that exactly (or, to himself, convincingly) express his feelings... The value of words help to define the feeling itself... The common failure is to allow habitual words and phrases, flowing spontaneously from the memory, to determine and deform the feelings.

This is the essential distinction--even opposition--between the painting and the film: the painting is composed subjectively, thefilm objectively. However highly we rate the function of the scenario writer--in actual practice it is rated very low--we must recognize that the film is not transposed directly and freely from the mind by means of a docile medium like paint, but must be cut piece-meal out of the lumbering material of the actual visible world.

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority.

An enormous amount of art and literature is erotic in the sense that it stimulates vague sexual emotions, but it has no pornographic intention or effect because "it leaves everything to the imagination." The consumer has to invent his own images, and it is felt, I do not know with what justification, that there is no harm in this.

The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason.

Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.