No person who is really refined, that is to say by character and taste and not by birth or wealth, can bear the crudity, the ugliness, and the decadence of those literary, artistic, psychoanalytic, or "progressive" circles which take a delight in uttering filthy four-letter words. Spirituality shrinks into silence in such garrulous company, takes curtained-off refuge in its own natural fastidiousness and refinement; but again I say these develop from within and are not imposed by the family or the "finishing school." Whatever superficial interest these circles may take in so-called mystic experience, materialism and egotism are their real religious creeds, just as courtesy is not a genuine characteristic of their behaviour, whatever outward show of it they may hypocritically have to make at times. The noisy cheap mannerless and brassy cafés of Montmartre and Montparnasse are their familiar spiritual homes.
-- Notebooks Category 6: Emotions and Ethics > Chapter 5 : Spiritual Refinement > # 47
