... clear thinking is not the characteristic which distinguishes our literature today. We are more and more caught up by the unintelligible. People like it. This argues an inability to think, or, almost as bad, a disinclination to think.

When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.

Poetry and preaching do not go well together; when the preacher mounts the pulpit the poet usually goes away.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

There is no better indication of what the people of any period are like than the plays they go to see.

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

The Old Testament is the record of men's conviction that God speaks directly to men.