Gregory

“Subsequent religious tradition has by and large encouraged us to take the Bible seriously rather than enjoy it, but the paradoxical truth of the matter may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“The notion of "the Bible as literature," though particularly contaminated in English by its use as a rubric for superficial college courses and for dubious publishers' packages, is needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language. (It would at the very least be gratuitous to speak of "Dante as literature," given the assured literary status of Dante's great poem, though the Divine Comedy is more explicitly theological, or "religious," than most of the Bible.)”
― Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative

“There is an old tradition that after the battle of Hastings William the Conqueror marched toward Dover, whereon Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Egelsine, the Abbot of St. Augustine's, assembled the people of Kent in arms at Swanscombe. Every man had a green bough in his hand, and when William approached he thought he saw a forest on the march. Then the people cast down the boughs, and sent a messenger to the Conqueror offering him peace if he would guarantee their ancient liberties, or "war, and that most deadly, if thou deny it them". Probably this legend is the earliest source of the incident of Birnam Wood in Shakespeare's Macbeth.”
― Henry Bett

“Seek simplicity, but distrust it,” Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher, once advised his students. Dobzhansky”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History