The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy.

The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.

Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of this opposition.

Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.

A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.

There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order.

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues.

Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive.

Bacon's not the only thing that's cured by hanging from a string.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.