You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.
All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?
But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees.
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.
When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.
We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.
It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life – namely myself.
How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself.