Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy? Should we not reply, With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleansed first. It may hurt, you know-even so, sir.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.

The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.

A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn't take long before everyone knows.

The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.