Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.

In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

State solutions are imposed from above; they are often without corrective devices, and cannot easily be reversed on the proof of failure. Their inflexibility goes hand in hand with their planned and goal-directed nature, and when they fail the efforts of the state are directed not to changing them but to changing people’s belief that they have failed.

The relation of the soul to the body is like that of a house to its bricks. The soul is a principle of organisation, which governs the flesh and endows it with meaning. It is no more separable from the flesh than is the house from its bricks, even if the soul may survive the gradual replacement of every bodily part.

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.