We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling..

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage..

Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications..

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation..

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling..

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And afte….

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together..

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out..

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment..

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them..

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed..

They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind..

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in hea….

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous..

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously..

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young..

confession ran in the family..

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitli….

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing..

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness..

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference..