For the Bible there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence, within nature itself. Nature is a fellow creature of man.
(U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.
Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation…
Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don’t mind being that.
Wisdom is the central form which gives meaning and position to all the facts which are acquired by knowledge, the digestion and assimilation of whatever in the material world the man comes in contact with.
A snowflake is probably quite unconscious of forming a crystal, but what it does may be worth study even if we are willing to leave its inner mental processes alone.
Advertising – a judicious mixture of flattery and threats.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it. I know no country where accountants have a higher social and moral status.
Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It’s a disastrous movement within politics and economics.
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It’s just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours.
Our country has shown a lack of will to resist its own disintegration .. . Canada is practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony colonial in psychology as well as in mercantile economics.
The human landscape of the New World shows a conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it.
We must reject that most dismal and fatuous notion that education is a preparation for life.
The bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.
War appeals to young men because it is fundamentally auto-eroticism.
There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.
Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic.