“God’s creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.”

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?

I think I don’t regret a single “excess” of my responsive youth I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.

I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art…what we are talking about and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

Things are always different than what they might be…If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.

The devil is compromise.

When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won’t meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It’s the perversion of idealism.

Whatever one is creating, one has to stick to one’s guns and just do it. That is all. Put your foot down and do not let your work be compromised.

Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production.

Make your decision for what is right not expedient, and wash your mind of all compromise.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

The struggle between the two worlds [Fascism and Democracy] can permit no compromises.

It speaks to your livelihood and it’s not compromised. It’s blunt. It’s raw, straight off the street – from the beat to the voice to the words.