The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

The moderns do not realize modernity.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.