To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.