if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong

--- T.S. Eliot (1927), quoted by Jason Harding in "T. S. Eliot's Shakespeare", Essays in Criticism, 65 (2) pp. 160-177 (2015)

Eliot quote:

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

many of the secrets of 'style' could ... be shown to be matters of tone

--- I.A. Richards, in Practical Criticism: A study of literary judgment (1930), p. 207, on Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"

Quote in context:

Gray, however, without overstressing any point, composes a long address, perfectly accommodating his familiar feelings towards the subject and his awareness of the inevitable triteness of the only possible reflections, to the discriminating attention of his audience. And this is the source of his triumph, which we may misunderstand if we treat it simply as a question of 'style'. Indeed, many of the secrets of 'style' could, I believe, be shown to be matters of tone, of the perfect recognition of the writer's relation to the reader in view of what is being said and their joint feelings about it.

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat

--- Leszek Kolakowski, in an essay titled “The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture” (1973), quoted by Jack Miles in "Why God Will Not Die", The Atlantic, December 2014

The Kolakowski passage quoted in Miles's essay:

Religion is man’s way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat. That it is not an inevitable defeat is a claim that cannot be defended in good faith. One can, of course, disperse one’s life over the contingencies of every day, but even then it is only a ceaseless and desperate desire to live, and finally a regret that one has not lived. One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is sense beyond that which is inherent in human history—if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.

Why is it that when people begin to relinquish the world, the first thing they relinquish is common sense?

--- Sri Aurobindo. Quoted by Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work (1986, ppbk 1989), p. 109.

mense met ʼn aptyt / vir vuurvreet sal vonke skyt

-- TT Cloete, in Karnaval en Lent (2014), quoted by Andries Visagie in an interview/review with Ilse Salzwedel on Skrywers en Boeke, 30 April 2014, around time code 19:09 ff.; also quoted in the the Versindaba review by Zandra Bezuidenhout, 17 March 2014

if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it over and over, something almost always comes of it

--- C. G. Jung, "The Aims of Psychotherapy," 1933. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung; Read, H.,
Fordham, M., Adler, G., McGuire, W., Eds.; Hull, R.F.C., Trans.; Princeton University Press:
Princeton, NJ, USA, 1954; Volume 16. Para 86. Quoted by Caifang ZHU in "Jung on the Nature and Interpretation of Dreams: A Developmental Delineation with Cognitive Neuroscientific Responses," Behav. Sci. 2013, 3(4), 662-675; doi:10.3390/bs3040662.