"An artist is by temperament a person who sees things as they are in themselves, not in those rough convenient categories which serve for the business of life."

"It is, I imagine, common in youth to feel in quick succession a number of different attitudes towards life and the world, and to feel each in turn as strongly as if it had no competitors."

"Altogether, it was rather like being in a somewhat spartan study centre - or perhaps even more like being in a monastery."

Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not.

"In our day, it is difficult to imagine a world in which everybody, high and low, educated and uneducated, was preoccupied with comets,"

"America is a man-made world; moreover it is a world which man has made by means of machinery."

"A contemplative habit of mind has advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound."

"When joy and pain are overcome, peace and love remain, and Wisdom softly whispers words of rest and calm."

"The great men who stand out in history have been partly benefactors of mankind and partly quite the reverse."

"To every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation."

"A good man is one whose opinions and activities are pleasing to the holders of power."