Sublime

the fact that there is nothing so really practical and urgent as ideal philosophy.

Let us be ocular athletes.

It does not occur to us that the mere assertion that this raging and confounding universe is governed by justice and mercy is a piece of staggering optimism fit to set all men capering.

for a wood is a palace with a million corridors that cross each other everywhere.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

the old religious conception, the only possible democratic basis, the idea that man himself is a king in disguise.

You think of a remote man merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way.

But I don’t see what a man can expect when he fights against arithmetic,