Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.

God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.