This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

We are all ill; but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

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.

At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.

Reasons for not keeping a notebook: 1) the ambiguity of the reader

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.