Wonder & Joy

“Now pantheism means that nothing is thus separated; that the divine essence is equally distributed at any given moment in all the atoms of the universe; and that he who would see it imaginatively must see it as a whole.”

“Dickens … has been a great deal handicapped by the common habit among his admirers of praising him for the wrong things. He is praised for being `true to life', while his true merit is not that he is true to life, but alive.”

“It is the essence of a holiday that it must be a revolution, and it is the essence of a revolution that it must revolve.”

Leisure “is not a trifling with unimportant things, but a vision of all the innumerable important things in the universe which are in themselves even more important than bread and cheese.”

“Why is it that a child who would be furious if told by his nurse not to walk off the kerbstone, invents a whole desperate system of footholds and chasms in a plane in which his nurse can see little but a commodious level?”

The experience of Bethlehem suggests “ancestral dawns and mystical abysses and the end of chaos and the creation of light.”

“…my fancy flies to an English railway station where I once dreamed a dream.”

“Every one of the main human interests was in old times made a part of the creed. Every one of those human interests is now put apart by itself, as if it were a monomania like collecting stamps.”

“The mere materialist is a body that has lost its head; the mere spiritualist is a head that has mislaid its body.”

“…people who are sentimental day and night are among the most atrocious of the enemies of society. Dealing with them is like seeing an interminable number of poetical sunsets going on in the early morning.”