Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

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

The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.

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.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.

Criticism should be a casual conversation.