Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.

Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.

To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.