You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

Our problem with desire is that we want too little.

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

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.

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.

Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into a glory