Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

The great artist takes what he needs.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

The recognized achievements of some Negroes, despite rigid racial barriers, indicate that society by its prejudices may be depriving itself of valuable contributions from many others. It is now doubtful whether America can afford the luxury of such a waste of human resources.