Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

My books are friends that never fail me.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.

Of all your troubles, great and small, the greatest are the ones that don't happen at all.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

We arc the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.