The great thing is to be found at one’s post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.
True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.
Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.
A myth is a lie that conveys a truth.
Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.
A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food.
You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as ‘what a man does with his solitude.’
To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow’s end or the Greek Calends.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
Every poem can be considered in two ways – as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
People blush at praise – not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs.
To fight in another man’s armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.
If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.