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“To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

“People at an art school either do an atrocious amount of work or do no work at all.”

“It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring shy people out…Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never have the cheek to govern: and (according to Christian ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the cheek to do it.”

“Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors.”

“This strong, square shape, this shutting off of everything else is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fair tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

“For my friend said he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of the palm tree, opening for opening’s sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid.”

“It is only we who play badly who love the Game itself. You love glory; you love applause; you love the earthquake voice of victory; you do not love croquet. You do not love croquet until you love being beaten at croquet.”

“I am astonished at how many young Christians want to be writers and how few of them want to mess with all the prerequisites, which look suspiciously to them like work.”

“Even a nihilist writer, showing the thin smoke that constitutes all things, is trying to make the point that there isn’t one.”

“We live in a narcissistic age, which means that many want to have the praise that comes from having read, without the antecedent labor of actually reading.”

“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”