1. "A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values."
2. "All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning. I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty."
3. "A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression."
4. "As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady."
5. "Good art however ''immoral'' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise."
6. "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."
7. "Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts."
8. "If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point."
9. "I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them."
10. "It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio."
11. "Literature is news that stays news."
12. "Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity."
13. "Men do not understand books until they have had a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
14. "No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents."
15. "One measure of a civilization, either of an age or of a single individual, is what that age or person really wishes to do. A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time."
16. “Only the most absolute sincerity under heaven can affect any change."
17. "People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf."
18. “Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
19. “The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
20. "The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring."
21. "The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."
22. "The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time. You never get clarity as long as you have these packaged words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways. That seems to me to be the first fight, if there is going to be any intellect left."
23. "There is no reason why the same man should like the same book at 18 and at 48."
24. "'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two."
25. "Wars are made to make debt."
26. "We do not know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time."
27. "With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands."
