The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.
The bedrock of doubt is the total nothingness of death. Death is a leveler, not because everybody dies, but because nobody understands what death means.
The supremacy of the verbal over the monumental has something about it of the supremacy of life over death.
The Book of Revelation, difficult as it may be for “literalists,” becomes much simpler when we read it typologically, as a mosiac of allusions to Old Testament prophecy.
The entire Bible, viewed as a “divine comedy,” is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.
We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling “life is a dream” becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.
The ups and downs of this cosmos may sometimes be acknowledged to be metaphorical ups and downs, but until about Newton’s time most people took the “up” of heaven and the “down” of hell to be more or less descriptive.
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It’s a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
Between religion’s this is and poetry’s but suppose this is, there must always be some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity.
Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind.
We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.
The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.
Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself.
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I know no other country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.