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.

Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.

100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.

We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.

At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.

You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well.

For they (art and music) are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.