Communism has served us ill in having us swap a living brotherhood for what looks to have the features of the coldest of all chill abstractions.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

There's room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.

Africa, help me to go home, carry me like an aged child in your arms. Undress me and wash me. Strip me of all of these garments, strip me as a man strips off dreams when the dawn comes. . . .

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.

Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.

And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty....And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.

Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.

Love is the universe.

Note to the wise: whenever someone insists that he wants to buy something from you, but tells you there’s no real value in it yet, two things are happening: he’s lying, and you’re being taken.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

What a dull world if we knew all about geese!

Emerson is a person who lives instinctively on ambrosia - and leaves everything indigestible on his plate.

I regret not the things I have done, only those I have yet to do.

No Task will be so sordid and base, provided you obey your calling in it, that it will not shine and be reckoned very precious in God's sight.

The cat is nature's masterpiece.

I never thought of myself as a really particularly great singer.

Actually the best thing I did was to get thrown out by my wife. She's living with a fitness instructor. He drinks that yellow stuff in tins. He's an idiot.