Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.

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

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.

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

Ideology is not the product of thought; it is the habit or the ritual of showing respect for certain formulas to which, for various reasons having to do with emotional safety, we have very strong ties of whose meaning and consequences in actuality we have no clear understanding.

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.