Le silence est une musique qui parle à l'âme. - André Malraux

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.

I don't argue with my enemies; I explain to their children.

Each form of the sacrosanct was regarded by members of the culture which gave rise to it as a revelation of the Truth; at Byzantium it was not a mere hypothesis that was sponsored by the majesty of the Byzantine style. To us, however, these forms make their appeal as forms alone — in other words, as they would be were they the work of a contemporary (and, since this actually is unthinkable, they affect us in a puzzling manner); or else as so many grandiose vestiges of a faith that has died out. We look at them from outside; they are still emotive, but they are no longer true. Thus we deprive them of what was their most vital element; for a religious civilization that regarded what it revered as a mere hypothesis is inconceivable.