He stood transfixed before the unaccustomed view of London at night time, a vast panorama which reminded him […] of some wood engravings far off and magical, in a printshop in his childhood.

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise definition of what its essence consists of. ... I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name.

Everything about China is super-sized: The five new parks, which in some cases stitched together an older patchwork of conservation zones, sprawl across more than 88,800 square miles of territory—a protected area more than 25 times the size of Yellowstone National Park in the United States.

that spacious cell Like an upaithric temple wide and high, Whose aëry dome is inaccessible, Was pierced with one round cleft through which the sunbeams fell.