Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Being a Jew is like walking in the wind or swimming: you are touched at all points and conscious everywhere.

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader--it is never quite oneself. 2) I usually hate the sight of my handwriting--it lives too much and I dislike its life--I mean by "lives," of course, betrays too much!

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.

There is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

The diminution of the reality of class, however socially desirable in many respects, seems to have the practical effect of diminishing our ability to see people in their difference and specialness.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.