“If art were nothing more than a reflection of societies, which pass like shadows of clouds upon the earth, we should ask no more of art than it teach us history. But it recounts man to us, and, through him, the universe. It goes beyond the moment, it lengthens the duration of time, it widens the comprehension of man, and extends the life and limit of the universe. It fixes moving eternity in its momentary form.”

““Patriotism,” as a great patriot concluded on the eve of her execution by her country’s enemies, “is not enough.” Neither is socialism, nor communism, nor capitalism; neither is art, nor science, nor public order, nor any given religion or church. All these are indispensable, but none of them is enough. Civilisation demands from the individual devoted self-identification with the highest of human causes. But if this self-identification with what is human is not accompanied by a conscious and consistent effort to achieve upwards self-transcendence into the universal life of the Spirit, the goods achieved will always be mingled with counterbalancing evils. “We make,” wrote Pascal, “an idol of truth itself; for truth without charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship.” And it is not merely wrong to worship an idol; it is also exceedingly inexpedient. The worship of truth apart from charity—self-identification with science unaccompanied by self-identification with the Ground of all being—results in the kind of situation which now confronts us. Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

“For all your ills, I give you laughter.”

“You’re missin’ the point. The success of the band was irrelevant - you raised their expectations of life, you lifted their horizons. Sure we could have been famous and made albums and stuff, but that would have been predictable. This way it’s poetry.”

“I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognise what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?”