“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.”

“The greatest of poems is an inventory.Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped itin the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, tolook at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happyone could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to thesolitary island.”

“The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.”

“But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

“The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.”

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”