“And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.”

“The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.”

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past”

“The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.”

“It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”

“I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”

“Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?”