"What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level, what you owe is power-that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse, and each separate i"
"Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. 世人对文学这两个更为重要的作用思之甚少,所以如果有人说赋予知识是书本平庸"
"I’m never more aware of the imitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power"
"To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses. Anyone with eyes can take delight in a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of "