“Translation can never do more than the approximate,so we shall, at least, be gloriously inaccurate.”

“There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.”

“We all have a lot more to read than we can read and a lot more to do than we can do.”

“Either we shall find what it is we are seeking or at least we shall free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.”

“In attempting to say who Jesus is, the best we can do is to utter words provoked by the collective attempts to do so over the centuries-- a choral work we cannot possibly translate back into a few phrases, any more than we can assume that a concert is adequately described by its listing in the program, or that a painting is interchangeable with its title. Reading the program or the museum's catalogue, we have no notion of what actually was performed or displayed. We can extend the metaphor: a literal reading of the Bible amounts to little more than what we learn from a concert program, or even the score. It is the symphonic whole that bears the meaning that nothing less can remotely capture.”

“You will learn more from a glorious failure than ever you will from something that you never finished.”