“Hail Mary, thou blessed among women, generations shall rise up to greet,
After ages of wrangles and dogma, I come with a prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel’s red plumes were a wind in the lanes of thy lilies at eve,
We love, who have done with the churches, we worship, who may not believe.
Shall I reck that the chiefs we revolt with, stern elders with scoff and with frown,
Have scourged from thine altar the kneelers, and reft from thy forehead the crown?
For God’s light for the world has burnt through it, the thought whereof thou wert the sign,
As a sign, for all faiths are as symbols, as human, and man is divine. We know that men prayed to their image and crowned their own passions as powers, We know that their gods were their shadows, nor are ‘shamed of this queen that was ours: We know as the people the priest is, as the men are the goddess shall be, And all harlots were worshipped in Cyprus, all maidens and mothers in thee. Who shall murmur of dreams or be sour when the tale of thy …Mehr

1. Love precedes lovability: "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
2. Modern streets are "noisy with taxicabs and motorcars," but that's the noise of "laziness and fatigue," not activity. If everyone walked, streets would be quieter but more alive. Modern thought is like a modern street - noisiness, long words, loud ideas...hiding laziness
3. The paradox of fairytales: "All the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairytale"
4. How to think about the environment around us: "This is not a world, but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colors of a picture as the colors of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision..."
5. Healthy men have bandwidth for superfluity: "It's the happy man who does …Mehr

It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it. Agnosticism (which has, I am sorry to say, almost entirely disappeared from the modern world) is always an admirable thing, so long as it admits that the thing which it does not understand may be much superior to the mind which does not understand it.
A Handful of Authors. p.163.
There is still a notion that the agnostic can remain secure of this world, so long as he does not wish to be what is called "other-worldly.” He can be content with common sense about men and women, so long as he is not curious of mysteries about angels and archangels. It is not true. The questions of the sceptic strike direct at the heart of this our human life; they disturb this world, quite apart from the other world; and it is exactly common sense that they disturb most. There could not be a better example than this queer appearance, in my youth, of the determinist as a demagogue; …Mehr

An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed …Mehr

“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate... effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
“He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
“In history... the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him... While the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum... that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other... When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.”
“The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.”
“Reason is always a kind of brute force... Those who appeal to the head rather than …Mehr

The thatch of the roof was as golden,
Though dusty the straw was and old,
The wind was a peal as of trumpets,
Though blowing and barren and cold.
The mother's hair was a glory,
Though loosened and torn,
For under the eaves in the gloaming—
A child was born. Oh! if man sought a sign in the deepest, That God shaketh broadest His best; That things fairest, are oldest and simplest, In the first days created and blest. Far flush all the tufts of the clover, Thick mellows the corn, A cloud shapes, a daisy is opened— A child is born. Though the darkness be noisy with systems, Dark fancies that fret and disprove; Still the plumes stir around us, above us, The wings of the shadow of love. Still the fountains of life are unbroken, Their splendour unshorn; The secret, the symbol, the promise— A child is born. In the time of dead things it is living, In the moonless grey night is a gleam; Still the babe that is quickened may conquer, The life that is new may redeem. Ho! princes and priests, have ye …Mehr