Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.

What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a pure or exact science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.

No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself

Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony; colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.

One doesn't bother to believe the credible: the credible is believed already, by definition. There's no adventure of the mind.

We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.

Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.