Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
You die and you die and then you are beyond death.
One always feel better when one has made up one’s mind.
The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.
Once the feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.
Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts.
The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought.
No one can say ‘He jests at scars who never felt a wound’ for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.
I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them.
I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.
Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.
You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.
Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there’d be no difficulty.
Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.
Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you’ve been disappointed so often before.
While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.
Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all.
You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
They Open A Door And Enter A World.