Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies.

We have not merely escaped from something but into something... We have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything which shares with us the great adventure of being alive.

Every time a value is born, existence takes on a new meaning; every time one dies, some part of that meaning passes away.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and a sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.