For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

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.

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.