We are more successfully healed by the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of nature) than by the most ingenious medical application.

The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.

In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.

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 modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.

Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness. ... If he is with a business organization, the odds are great that he has sacrificed every other kind of independence in return for that dubious one known as financial.

The hero can never be a relativist.