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If there must be blame, then all citizens—you, I, everyone—are responsible for letting it be that kind of world, for not placing ethical development ahead of every other kind. We understand ethical necessities quite well; we’ve been capable of understanding them for several thousand years; but we haven’t been willing to let them rule our actions—it’s that simple.

The three billion crawl about, all over the helpless earth, destroying and defiling, killing the forests, polluting the air with smoke and radioactive dust and the torturing noises of the machine. In place of meadows, filling stations. The lakes are puddles of human filth. Two years ago the whole area of San Francisco Harbor was covered with dead fish: even the ocean is sick from the human taint, and this they call progress.

A crisis passed usually means another one approached.

The ocean, forever changing and the same, was awake with deep music tonight; I was alone and not alone at all. Not alone, looking down some hours from the moving bow, seeing the flash and lingering subsidence of the noctilucae, those living diamonds of the sea, their light as transient as the sea foam and eternal as life, if life is eternal. Everything goes with me, the cherished faces, the words that endure although no embodied voice is near my body but only the great continuing voice of the sea and of a westerly wind out of the open regions of the world. I am not alone.

“Propaganda is bad art.”

“Aren’t you thinking in terms of music, though?”

“No. In music the problem just doesn’t exist. You don’t even start looking for propaganda in music unless your head’s already addled.”

“Yes, but in art—well, Daumier, Goya, Hogarth—”

“They live,” said Sharon, “because they were good artists. If their social ideas had been the kind we don’t happen to like in the twentieth century, their work would last just the same. Cellini was a louse. The piety of Blake and El Greco almost doesn’t exist nowadays. Their work does.”

The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world.

She likes to talk, but her mill often shuts off suddenly, because of a quality of hers which I find good as well as rare: I mean that when she has no more to say she doesn’t go on talking.

“I wonder,” said Abraham, “if I’d ever think I knew enough to act.”

“If you don’t, then study all your life and talk a little when you believe you have something to say.”

What hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away.

It’s pointless to argue with mythology.

We all have our own island, the one we carry with us wherever we go.

One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.