The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.

It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.

Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.