We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death.

You asked for a loving God: you have one... The consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.

Delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.

Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.