Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture and ourselves.

... the greatest menace to our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul.

Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.

Modern religious teaching have little or nothing to say about the place of prudence in life or in the hierarchy of virtues.

Wonder is defined by Thomas [Aquinas] in the Summa Theologiae [I-II, Q. 32, a. 8], as the desiderium sciendi, the desire for knowledge, active longing to know.

To celebrate a festival means: to live out, for some special occasion and in an uncommon manner, the universal assent to the world as a whole.

Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good.

All just order in the world is based on this, that man give man what is his due.

[T]o know means to reach the reality of existing things[.]

The "supreme good" and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.

The ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation.

There is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Peace, and there is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Love.

If you win the battle in the mind, you have the weapon of life.

If a man will stand up and assert, and repeat and re-assert, that two and two do not make four, I know nothing in the power of argument that can stop him.

It's always hard to explain why an audience ultimately responds to a movie.

We're not very dangerous animals; we don't have a horn like a rhino or quills like a porcupine.

Why should a man say what he feels, when a women is going to ignore what he says?

Even a bad man is better than a good book.

My life is very busy with a lot of things, and so I don't get uninterrupted time. When I do, I can just write all day.

You've got to push yourself harder. You've got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You've got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.

Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep.