The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.

A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.

In vulgar usage, progress has come to mean limitless movement in space and time, accompanied, necessarily, by an equally limitless command of energy: culminating in limitless destruction.

If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.