It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.
We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
God is not an optional extra, He’s an absolute must!
If you never take risks, you’ll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.
You can give the Devil too much or too little attention.
I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us.
The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They’ll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don’t you worry.
We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.
We cannot fully understand the relations of time and choice until we are beyond both.
Prosperity knits a man to the world.
Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.
To move with the times is, of course, to go where all times go.
Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.
Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
Extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people. Maybe it’s a sign that you’ve got an extraordinary destiny – something greater than you could’ve imagined.
Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.
A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.