Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.