It's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.

To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

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.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.