When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.