Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

I once worked as a salesman and was very independent. I took orders from no one.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.