Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me?
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it.
You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.
Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.
What can you ever really know of other people’s souls – of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
Each time you fall He’ll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection.
When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become even conscious of them all.
God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination.
We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.
When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over.
A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.
You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are “on” concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.