"Nought usually comes at the beginning," Ralph said. "Not necessarily," said Sibyl. "It might come anywhere. Nought isn't a number at all. It's the opposite of number." Nancy looked up from the cards. "Got you, aunt," she said. "What about ten? Nought's a number there - it's part of ten." "Well, if you say that any mathematical arrangement of one and nought really makes ten - " Sibyl smiled. "Can it possibly be more than a way of representing ten?"

Love was even more mathematical than poetry. It was the pure mathematics of the spirit.

The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.

How can one bargain for anything that is worth while? And what else is worth bargaining for?

Every contrition for sin is apt to encourage a not quite charitable wish that other people should exhibit a similar contrition.

Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter.

An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.