Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives.
I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers.
Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.
All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness.
As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.
Our desire is not only to SEE glory, but to participate in the glory we see.
Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.
Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments.
That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone.
You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.
If we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.
The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you.