To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

To learn a belief without the belief is to sing a song without the tune.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.

There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.