To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.

The way to perfection is through a series of disgusts

To know when one's self is interested, is the first condition of interesting other people.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

When you commune with your ever-present inner calm, you are released from the madness and pain of all outer turmoil.

Maybe that's why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

I regret it is not possible to marry by post.

I turned and faced the Olympians."We need a shroud, " I announced, my voice cracking. "A shroud for the son of Hermes.

How is it Lord that we are cowards in everything save in opposing Thee?

The first rule of democracy is to distrust all leaders who begin to believe their own publicity.

In college, [Christian students] are assaulted by secular relativism, and if we don't prepare them, they will be like lambs led to slaughter.

I just want to be a guy with a guitar.

The more security you seek, the less freedom you have.