This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.

To Goethe again we owe the profound saying: “the mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true.

Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals...

The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature.

The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear.

At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful – now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Culture are transient.

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman...