Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

What is so wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.