Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.

The darkness declares the glory of light.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'

A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance.

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing.