Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species…. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

How stands it between God and your soul now?

John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

Educating the electorate in the limits of executive power. No one wants to believe it. And anyway, in a democracy there's always an opposition to tell them that anything is possible.

P.A. James, A Taste for Death

Facts are like cows, if you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.

Bunter’s mother in Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
 

Blake: From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.

The fox condemns the trap, not himself.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Expect poison from the standing water.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. 

 

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The nations were not sane—rational, composed, aware, but not sane. In each nation, the arsenal included potent distrust and even hatred. 

Greg Bear, Eons

To know good by knowing good is the privilege of the unfallen.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR.  

 

Eloquence and erudition were the twin prerequisites of greatness ... any effort expended in the cultivation of such gifts would surely be rewarded, if not in this world then in the world to come.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR. 

From A Perfect June Day

 Trees are fingers of the earth for the wind to play with.

All women ... were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand. 

Greg Bear,  Legacy