The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Human beings are mercifully so constituted as to be able to conceal from themselves what they intend to do until they are well into the doing of it.

Existence in itself, taken at its least miraculous, is a miracle.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.