Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.

Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy.

Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.

Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. (senior devil speaking)

The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.

Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.