I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

Here, then, is the point at which I see the new mission of the librarian rise up incomparably higher than all those preceding. Up until the present, the librarian has been principally occupied with the book as a thing, as a material object. From now on he must give his attention to the book as a living function. He must become a policeman, master of the raging book.

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.

In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.