About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; How well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.

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

Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

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.