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

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

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.

When the author walks on the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right...something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise...it will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.

Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.

The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.

I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.