It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.

One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.

The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.