"They are bookish. They are indeed very credulous of books. They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is imply untrue." (11)

"Like all his successors, Cicero makes the Moon the boundary between eternal and perishable things, and also asserts the influence of the planets on our fortunes—rather vaguely and incompletely but also without the qualifications which a medieval theologian would have added." (28)

"The daemons are 'between' us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal; like mortal men, they are passible." (42)

"Nothing will seem stranger to a modern than the series of chapters which Chalcidius entitles 'On the utility of Sight and Hearing'. The primary value of sight is not, for him, its 'survival-value'. The important thing is that sight begets philosophy. For 'no man would seek God nor aspire...