Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.

To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.

Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.

We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.