Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy.
We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem.
If you simply try to tell the truth you will, nine times out of ten, be original without ever having noticed it.
I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn’t.
We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
And this is the marvel of marvels; that he called me Beloved.
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.
Much is expected from those to whom much is given.
Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you – almost apart from their meaning – a thrill like music?
Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers.
One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.
In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.
Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’
This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.
The beauty of life, is that you don’t have to be modernly beautiful to live it.