“This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.”

“How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.”

“Beauty brings copies of itself into being.”

“Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.”

“To accuse others for one's own misfortune is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one's education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one's education is complete.”

“One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.”

“To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.”