Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success.

The semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others' experiences.

Absorption in ease is one of the most reliable signs of present or impending decay.

Try to imagine a man setting out for the day without a single prejudice. ... Inevitably he would be in a state of paralysis. He could not get up in the morning, or choose his necktie, or make his way to the office, ... or, to come right down to the essence of the thing, even maintain his identity.

In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them.

It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration. ... As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development. ... The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics.

Until the world perceives that "good" cannot be applied to a thing because it is our own, and "bad" because it is another's, there is no prospect of realizing community.