“We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.”

“But the most obvious fact about praise -- whether of God or anything -- strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise. ... The world rings with praise -- lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game. ... I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.”

“The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.”

“This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”

“When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object.”

“Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.”

“The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics.”