If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

You can't really study people; you can only get to know them.

You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.

I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene?