Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!

I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.

What we have not has made us what we are. / ... / What we are not drives us to consummation.

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

“How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.”

It is curious how any making of order makes one feel mentally ordered, ordered inside.

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.